wrong images appearing on shared services

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  stevewsimpson · Member · Jul 21, 2015 at 7:53 am

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  When I share to google+ and facebook, occasionally images from other posts seem to be picked up. I have the impression it happens when I finally publish a long-standing draft and/or it might relate to changing images on existing posts. It’s not the same for fb and google. If this is real, is there any way to avoid it?

  Thanks for any assistance

  Steve

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

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  kokkieh · Staff · Jul 21, 2015 at 9:06 am

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  Hi there. I’m afraid this is a mistake on the social media site’s side. WordPress.com “suggests” to those sites which images to use, but those sites’ programming makes the final decision.

  Setting the image you want as featured image should make other sites give it preference, but it doesn’t always work. In Facebook’s case debugging the Facebook cache also makes it pick a different image in most cases. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent process for Google+. You can see this support doc for more information: https://en.support.wordpress.com/facebook-image-thumbnail/

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  stevewsimpson · Member · Jul 21, 2015 at 9:50 am

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  Thanks for your assistance. I’ll try the featured image next time and if it works I guess I’ll change over all the posts in my blog.

  One catch is that I don’t want to do anything too complicated, otherwise I might as well set it up manually on the other sites.

  Thanks again

  Steve

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  kokkieh · Staff · Jul 21, 2015 at 9:52 am

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  Keep in mind that setting a featured image for older posts won’t change anything if those posts have already been shared, as Facebook would already have cached the image used for that share. But going forward, setting a featured image before you publish a post should do the trick in most cases.

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  stevewsimpson · Member · Jul 21, 2015 at 9:59 am

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  Thanks, yes, just for uniformity of appearance. Actually I think it looks better, I should have done it sooner.

  Steve