Facebook autopost not displaying featured image

It seems that the plugin grabs the 1’st image in the post which is not necessarily the featured image. Is there a way to display the featured image instead of the 1st image of the post? Thanks.

P.S. I set ‘Text Post with “attached” link’ for Facebook.

When any story is published, a check of the source code in the browser one second after publishing shows that the OG tags are there and are correct each and every time. I have done this check for many times to verify. So how can the plugin authors claim that “at the time of the auto-publishing your OG tags are not there or incorrect”. Are you saying the OG tags appear magically after the story is already published? What mechanism would make OG tags not be there at publication but get inserted later? Something here is not making sense and it is best to just investigate without assuming that all of us are wrong. We all want this plugin to work and it doesn’t help to be defensive about its flaws.

@nickelaos92, my experience is that it picks the avatar of the article author and ignores all images, including the featured image.

By the way, whenever I post an article manually on Facebook, it picks the correct featured image every single time but the autoposting doesn’t work. So if it is true that this plugin merely sends the URL to Facebook which then picks the details from the OG tags on the story, then logic dictates that the result should be exactly the same in both cases. If autoposting fails to make Facebook get the data from OG tags, then even posting manually should also fail since the OG tags are incorrect or not there.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Lethalmiko.

Same as Lethalmiko. Thank you for your comments.

It seems that the plugin grabs the 1’st image in the post which is not necessarily the featured image.

nickelaos92, Lethalmiko, omriamos and everybody else with the same issue. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE UNDERSTAND.

I would love to solve your issue. I would really, really, really would love to do that.

BUT FACEBOOK TOOK OFF THAT POSSIBILITY FROM US

You are saying “plugin grabs”. It’s not the way is works anymore. Facebook removed the ability for plugin to grab anything on July 18th.

Plugin can’t control image, title and description of the shared links anymore.

Please set your OG tags correctly. Nothing else can be done.

Please see the explanation of how it changed again:

How SNAP worked before the July 18, 2017.

1. You hit “Publish” button.
2. WordPress changes the status of the post to “published” and calls the special hook from SNAP attached to that event.
2. SNAP collects the post info, then calls Facebook and says “Hi Facebook. Here the URL of the link I want to publish on my Facebook page, this is the title for that link, this is the description, this is the image”.
3. Facebook publishes the link with provided title, description and image

How SNAP works after the July 18, 2017.

1. You hit “Publish” button.
2. WordPress changes the status of the post to “published” and calls the special hook from SNAP attached to that event.
2. SNAP calls Facebook and says “Hi Facebook. Here the URL of the link I want to publish on my Facebook page.
3. Facebook visits the provided URL, collects title, description and image from OG metatags and than publishes the link with collected from OG tags title, description and image.

SNAP calls Facebook and says “Hi Facebook. Here the URL of the link I want to publish on my Facebook page”. Facebook visits the provided URL, collects title, description and image from OG metatags and than publishes the link with collected from OG tags title, description and image.

@nextscripts, you are basically claiming that the mechanism Facebook uses to automatically pick data from the OG tags doesn’t work correctly after receiving the URL from your plugin, yet the mechanism works when someone posts the exact same URL manually on a facebook page. If this is true, then you should get in touch with Facebook to alert them about this and ask them to fix it.

It is simply NOT TRUE that the OG tags are not set correctly or that they are missing at time of publication. Insisting on believing in something that is demonstrably false makes it impossible for you to get to the bottom of this problem and solve it.

ok. Let’s see what is true or not.

We added some special debug code to the SNAP. Please update plugin to 3.8.7.

Please go to the plugin settings and change the “Log/History Info Level” to “Extended/Debug”. After that SNAP will ask Facebook to scrape the URL right before posting and add the scrape result on the log.

PS: Please note. Nothing has been changed in SNAP. The only new thing it will do is to grab the URL info from Facebook right before sharing the link. If your OG tags are ok at that time, you will see the correct info, if not you will see something incorrect.