Feature Images and Excerpts Not Appearing in Facebook Posts
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I notice that some of my posts, when I share on Facebook, the feature image and excerpt don’t appear like the used to. I recently switched to a the Intergalactic theme, so maybe it’s the theme. But it seems totally random. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Is anyone familiar with this issue?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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It’s common. It’s Facebook changing the way it pulls images. I’m afraid if you’ve already set a featured image there’s nothing more you can do.
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We have no control over the images that Facebook or any other social networks chooses to display or when they choose to flush their image caches. We really only send them the URL of the post, and they hunt through that for the excerpt and images to include.
Maybe these will help or maybe not.
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
http://en.support.wordpress.com/facebook-image-thumbnail/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/#images-in-publicize -
Thanks for the links and replies. Below are the warnings that Facebook returned for the post in question:
http://daredreamermag.com/2014/12/11/the-power-of-intentionality/The odd thing is that the post I published the day before doesn’t have these warnings (and that feature image DID show on Facebook):
http://daredreamermag.com/2014/12/10/my-new-five-dollar-video-service/But I didn’t do anything different. The only thing I can think of is if the photo dimensions are different. 640×270 for the post that worked; 900×560 for the post that didn’t work. Any thoughts.
FWIW, here’s what Facebook’s debugger returned for the post whose featured imaged didn’t post. Again, I didn’t do anything different in publishing this post than the other.
Critical Errors That Must Be Fixed
Bad Response Code URL returned a bad HTTP response code.Errors That Must Be Fixed
Missing Required Property The ‘og:type’ property is required, but not present.Warnings That Should Be Fixed
Inferred Property The ‘og:url’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.Inferred Property The ‘og:title’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.
Inferred Property The ‘og:description’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.
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Hi Ron,
When you run the debug tool and you get errors, in most cases you just need to click the button which says “Fetch new scrape information.” I did that for your URL http://daredreamermag.com/2014/12/11/the-power-of-intentionality/ and it is now pulling an image correctly.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks “A Mighty WP.” So, should I do that debug thing before I post a blog post? If I post first, notice the image isn’t working, then debug and post again, that would be kind of annoying. Thoughts?
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This type of thing doesn’t happen often. In fact in most cases it happens when someone shares a post before there are any images uploaded or much text in place (so Facebook doesn’t have anything TO share!).
If you are a bit gunshy, it doesn’t ever hurt to use the debugger, but in almost all cases it isn’t necessary. It’s just there as a fallback. You should be OK!
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Thanks again. So all you need to do is run that debugger? There’s nothing else to do on my end once that’s done?
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Well, and make sure that the images that you place on your post meet Facebook’s minimum criteria of course. I believe that they require that your image be a minimum of 200 pixels wide. Other than that, you should be all good!
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Thanks. Usually my Feature images are between 600 and 1000 pix wide. In fact, I had thought maybe that was the issue. Seemed like the posts with the 900+ pix images were the ones not displaying.
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My own personal experience is that Facebook can timeout requests every once in a while as well when I’m trying to use a larger image. Those are the times that I have to use the debugger (and sometimes I’ll even have to click the debugger a couple of times to get it to fetch the image correctly). They just may have a really short timeout window for fetching images.
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