Facebook posting the wrong image with article
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We have our site posting to Facebook anytime we have a new article. However, lately the post showing up on Facebook has included a random image from our Instagram widget instead of the article’s featured image. Is this a glitch on the WP side? Or is this something on the Facebook side?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hey Jason,
Normally, provided the featured image is large enough, it should overshadow any other images on the page as the preferred image to share on social media services:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/#images-in-publicize
I took a look at your Facebook page, and it looks like the correct image is shown here:
Can you let me know if that post was published manually to Facebook or automatically via Publicize? I have a hunch it’s the former.
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This happens on random posts. Not every single one. Sometimes it will take the featured image — and I always make sure it’s correctly sized, so that’s not an issue.
All of our posts are going to Facebook through Publicize. If I were doing it manually, I would be picking the image to go with it and uploading to Facebook directly.
The FAQ to which you directed me says nothing about an image from the Instagram widget even being an option on the list from which Publicize pulls when it posts to social media. It actually looks like Publicize is pulling the first image it sees, which is why I put the Instagram widget further down in the widget column to make it “later” in the code.
If you’ll look at our FB post “DEFIANCE: Speaking for the Dead” from September 5th, you’ll see it pulled a screen shot of our computer, instead of using the featured image from the show.
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Hey Jason,
You’re absolutely right. It looks like the featured image is set properly for your post “DEFIANCE: Speaking for the Dead”. It also looks like we’re sending the correct image to Facebook. You can see the image Facebook is seeing for your post here:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/
Just enter your post URL (http://scifi4me.com/2014/09/05/defiance-speaking-for-the-dead/) and click “Fetch new scrape information”. You’ll get a bunch of information back, but the key part is here:
<meta property="og:image" content="http://scifi4me.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/defiance_nup_158002_0750.jpg" />If you check out that URL, it’s the same image you have set as the featured image for that post. So, this means that we’re sending the correct information to Facebook.
We can’t force Facebook to use that information. Facebook tries to pull the best image for your post. Honestly, I’m not quite sure why it’s pulling the Instagram image occasionally instead of the designated featured image.
Unfortunately, I can’t guarantee that this will be fixed going forward. Since we’re sending the correct information, there’s really not much I can do other than suggest potentially removing the Instagram widget from individual post pages using the Visibility settings as described here:
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So there’s a way to customize the code so that the widgets and the right-hand sidebar are only on the main page and not on the individual posts? I’ve been looking for that since we started using this template.
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