If no og:image or link rel=”image_src“ is given, Facebook tries to guess the thumbnail image for the article url by scraping the html for images.
Is there any way to prevent Facebook from doing this?
What I'm basically trying to achieve is to have my articles shared on Facebook without any images.
(I know it's a rather unusual question, but I definitely don't want to provide any og:image or link rel=”image_src“ meta information.)
This isn't exactly what you're asking for but have you considered specifying either one of those tags and providing a URL to a spacer image (1x1px with a transparent or white background)?
Related
The ShareThis Facebook button will only pull the logo as an image to choose from a page. I am not sure why this is the case since I have other images on pages that I am trying to share from. Can someone help me out with this. I am not really familiar with the ShareThis API. Thanks for any help or feedback.
I tried using the Facebook URL Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. When doing so, Facebook found all the images on the page, but ShareThis doesn't seem to do the same. That is why I am guessing it is a ShareThis related issue.
The client wants the person posting the page/blog post to be able to select the image from the images on the page. This is normally the case with the ShareThis API, but does not seem to do so. Otherwise I would have just used the open graph option.
URL of site: http://www.atranquilnook.com/
1-30-14: I tried specifying an image with open graph meta on a page. The image was larger than 200 x 200, but it still did not work.
This appears to be happening on every page of the site.
Note: I did not build this site. It was built in Adobe Muse by someone else.
This is not a real answer, but I have to use the space here, to get you all the details of what I found out.
On the debugger it says https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atranquilnook.com%2F :
Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200 px. Image 'http://www.atranquilnook.com/images/header-home03.png' will be used instead.
Since there is the image with the couple, which is bigger than 200px x 200px, I do not know if this is the answer, but you could try by uploading some bigger image.
Although the whole warning is deceptive, since a line above it states, that there is no og:image.
Looks like you are relying on Facebook being smart enough to find "better" image on your site. What you should do instead is adding a meta tag in the head section of your page.
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.yoursite.com/img/some-image.jpg"/>
This will tell Facebook exactly what you want to rest of the world to see.
When the og:image tag is not defined facebook searches for other images available on the page. I need to tell facebook no to use any images if the og:image tag is not there.
That isn't a feature, Facebook's crawler will always try to find the best image if you don't specify one
Upon sharing a link on Facebook with og:image and og:video tags it will, under the right conditions, consistently display the wrong thumbnail image. Our clients are having this problem but unfortunately I cannot consistently replicate the conditions under which this issue occurs.
Go to the QVC UK Facebook page and look for video shares (example post). You'll see that the thumbnail for the video is the QVC logo when it should be the image given in the og:image tag. When putting the link through Facebook's debug tool the correct image is displayed with no content warnings or errors. This only seems to be happening when the URL is shared for the first time as subsequent shares will display the correct image. The image is present on our CDN before the URL is shared on Facebook. When I did manage to luckily replicate this issue; running the debugger before sharing on Facebook did not seem to solve the problem.
Am I missing something obvious, is there something wrong with my meta tags or could this be a potential facebook bug?
I've seen that multiple people are recording the same sort of problem on Facebook however only this bug has been left open (as of June 21st). In a related bug report Facebook mention that their crawlers don't only look at the image in the og tag but also look for other relevant images within the page.
Is it possible that it is seeing the QVC logo used so many times on the page that it decides to randomly overwrite the one specified?
Thanks
-- UPDATE
This only seems to be a problem when sharing to Facebook pages as opposed to a user's timeline. Changing the image URL seems to have temporarily fixed the problem. This looks like a Facebook bug
Despite the meta tags (the first one I never used before, but it came up in the addthis forums);
And the debug tool getting the data in a correct manner:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mondiales.nl%2F
The facebook sharer code does not use the image specified. No images show up at all, there is no thumbnail chooser.
Looking at the HTML of the facebook sharer page, the image is actually there! The thumbnail chooser has a display:none. And when posting the damn thing, no image shows up on the wall.
Stop using addthis and implement a like function using the just the Facebook API? But from what I read, Facebook does a request for the page to get it's data so the JS part should not be the issue, should it?
Did I overlook something?
There's a restriction on the width/height ratio of images shared, the ratio must be less than 3.0
Your image is too wide (211/66 = 3.19) - add some vertical whitespace and it'll share OK i think
For future reference this is mentioned on both the old Share Button docs and the Open Graph protocol docs (under 'og:image')
I've found that once I've posted something to my wall from the sharer or the app, if I try to repost it, it will remember the original image (or no image in your case).
It might be worth clearing the whole cache/cookies from your browser and see if that does the trick.
If not, you'll find that if you log in as another user of Facebook and they try to post it, it will pick up on the new image on their account and not yours.
I'm not exactly sure how Facebook caches the images.
I know this thread is old but this may help someone else with the same issue. FB caches shared urls along with the thumb images and descriptions. To update the cache, add a bogus parameter to your shared query string, like, "?v=1". This gets the latest og tags.
I know it's possible to tell Facebook to use a certain image when sharing a page by adding a meta tag. But I was wondering if the opposite is possible: telling facebook NOT to user a certain image as the thumbnail when sharing a page.
I am asking this question because when I share a link from my site it always shows some image I use in the footer first (as the default thumbnail), which is bad :) so I want Facebook to ignore that specific image when sharing.
Thanks in advance!
This is a little hackish but it worked for me. So the only criteria that facebook uses to ignore images is the width to height ratio, all other images in your page will get picked up and will be an option as a thumbnail. So what I did is expose the undesirable images as css in a div tag, instead of as an tag. Then facebook won't picked them up.
I'm afraid this is not possible. Why don't you do the opposite of the opposite, and set an image to force facebook using that specific one?
So if you don't want to always set an image, make a default image to be used for facebook sharing everywhere unless otherwise specified.