Facebook OG pulling wrong images

When you share a post on Facebook, or when Jetpack Publicize publishes a post to your Facebook page, Facebook crawls the page and looks for Open Graph meta tags in the head to build a complete post preview (with an image, title, description, …).

As you discovered, Facebook has a debug tool to let you know what they see when they crawl your site. The “og:image could not be downloaded or is too small” error is usually due to the featured image or uploaded image not meeting Facebook’s size requirements, which are:

1. At least 200×200 pixels in both width and height

2. Aspect ratio of width and height no greater than 3; in other words, the width can’t be more than three times more than the height, and vice versa.

If both of those aren’t met, Facebook will crawl your site to find an image that does meet those requirements and they randomly pick whatever image they find.

However, the image being shown in your post “Vascoites go Mountaineering!” post is 6.2mb in size and is most likely not be served up fast enough for Facebook when your posts are scraped for content – which seems to be a known bug on Facebook’s end:
https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/294523810715538/

I would recommend uploading smaller sizes of your photos for the blog so they can be loaded more quickly so they don’t time out for Facebook’s servers until they address this bug. If you check your other posts that didn’t work, the images might also be too big.

I hope that helps!

ah. alrighty.
I didnt realise I was uploading that big a filsize. ??
In the beginning it looked to be only a publicize issue, as when i copy/pasted the link into facebook it would grab the right image… I then removed an rss featured image plugin i had installed and even directly posting on fb didnt work.

Maybe its just the file size issue. I need to check that angle out.

also (off topic) but, would facebook randomly choose images attached to a post (even from shortcode slideshow?) and use that if there isnt a Featured image selected?

thanks in advance,

Shiv

In the beginning it looked to be only a publicize issue, as when i copy/pasted the link into facebook it would grab the right image… I then removed an rss featured image plugin i had installed and even directly posting on fb didnt work.

Manually sharing a post works differently on Facebook’s end than using their Graph API to share a post (which is what Jetpack Publicize uses). I believe manually sharing doesn’t require the scraping check of the content prior to posting the article, so a timeout error may not occur.

also (off topic) but, would facebook randomly choose images attached to a post (even from shortcode slideshow?) and use that if there isnt a Featured image selected?

Our best estimate of how their process works is that they select images that are at least 200 x 200 pixels in the following order:

1. Featured image
2. An image attached to the post and inserted (which I would assume includes galleries)
3. Any other image in the post (not attached but perhaps linked)

However, it ultimately is Facebook that chooses the “best image” so there’s not much else we can do on our end to ensure a specific image is selected.

I hope that clarifies things!

Hi,

So i tried using smaller file sized images and made sure its more that 200pxs is size.

Still seem to have this issue.

Occurs randomly.. some posts seem to have the right image some end up with random images from the site.
Any clue whats happening?

They seem to get the right image if I directly post into fb though.

As I said before, we can only suggest the images via Publicize (which uses Facebook’s Graph API) to Facebook in the order of preference listed above. In the end, it’s Facebook that decides what image is chosen and there’s nothing we can do to change that.

Try putting a post where the wrong image was publicized in Facebook’s Debug tool to see why they didn’t choose the correct image.

I hope that clarifies things.

Hi carolyn
I am also get pain with this issue.
I have follow all the think what you say earlier but can not work.
and get the result like:

Occurs randomly.. some posts seem to have the right image some end up with random images from the site.

@nimesh: Could you please start your own thread, as per the Forum Welcome?

https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/jetpack#postform

Thank you!