How do I get an image to appear when I share on facebook using the Dusk to Dawn theme?

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  an2design4c · Member · Oct 23, 2015 at 11:49 pm

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  When I share a post on facebook no image appears in the box to the left of the text. Is there a way to fix this?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  designsimply · Member · Oct 23, 2015 at 11:59 pm

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  Try adding a featured image to each post before sharing it on Facebook:

  Featured Images

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  an2design4c · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 12:03 am

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  I’ve already done that, but I still get a blank white box where the image should be.

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  designsimply · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 2:26 am

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  Setting a featured image really should do the trick, if that isn’t working it’s possible the image you’re using is too small or something is going wrong on Facebook’s side or something neither of us has thought of is wrong with the post. To help take a closer look, can you provide an example link to what you tried to add to Facebook that isn’t working?

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  timethief · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 2:29 am

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  Maybe your hunch is right and featured image size is an issue:

  The featured image works best with images at least 588 wide. https://wordpress.com/themes/dusk-to-dawn/

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  an2design4c · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 3:59 am

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  Thanks for the feedback.

  I was trying to share the most current post on this page: https://ghsfinearts.wordpress.com/

  This is what appears when I try to share it:
  https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fghsfinearts.wordpress.com%2F2015%2F10%2F18%2Ffall-choir-concert-october-21st-2015%2F&t=Fall+Choir+Concert+-+October+21st%2C+2015&ret=login

  I read that Facebook sharing image sizes need to be a minimum of 600 x 315. The image I uploaded to my media library is 600 x 451, but it appears that the theme is shrinking it to 588 x 442. Could this be the issue? Is there any way to fix this?

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  designsimply · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 7:14 pm

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  Thank you for including a link. It’s extremely helpful to have a specific example to review when troubleshooting.

  Did you set the featured image after you originally published the post or before? Maybe updating after publishing caused the trouble?

  I tried checking a few details for the post you mentioned:
  https://ghsfinearts.wordpress.com/2015/10/18/fall-choir-concert-october-21st-2015/

  In the page source, I see the following “og:image” tag which is what Facebook says they will use as the image highlight—it looks correct to me and looks to be using a large enough image.
  <meta property=”og:image” content=”https://ghsfinearts.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/fall-choir-concert-600w.jpg” />

  Facebook aslo has a debugger:
  https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/

  When I enter the post URL you mentioned into their debugger, it returns the image as expected—here is a screenshot of what I see: https://cloudup.com/cVvWIgeADqg

  From all of this testing and debugging, everything that I can see shows the image working normally and it really looks to me like the code for the “og:image” as specified by Facebook’s instructions is also set correctly on the WordPress.com side. Because of this, my conclusion is that Facebook did not read the image correctly earlier but now it is (this may have just taken time for them to work out?) or Facebook didn’t read the image for that post correctly for some reason on their side that I don’t know about.

  The best advice I can think of for you from this point would be to try clearing your browser cache and cookies (this is a long shot) and try again, or maybe try contacting Facebook support to let them know the image code is correct but the image is not being shared correctly on their side. What we can do from the WordPress.com side is make sure the code is correct, and based on what I can see right now it looks correct to me.

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  an2design4c · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 10:27 pm

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  designsimply,
  Thanks so much for all the explanation and help! Clearing the cookies seemed to have made the difference. I had previously cleared the history. Glad to find out about the Facebook debugger, it may come in handy in the future.

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  timethief · Member · Oct 24, 2015 at 10:30 pm

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  For those who locate this in the searchbox in the future please note:

  We have no control over the images that Twitter, 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.

  See http://en.support.wordpress.com/publicize/#images-in-publicize

  Re: Facebook
  Sometimes these help and sometimes they don’t
  http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

  Facebook Image Thumbnail