Facebook Not Recognizing Metadata

Question

I'm having trouble getting Facebook to recognize the og:image tag. It seems to scrape correctly, but then I get this warning:

og:image could not be downloaded or is too small Provided og:image could not be downloaded or is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook. Image 'http://ericrovtar.com/images/logo/800x200_reverse.png' will be used instead.

Yet looking at the raw data from the debugger:

"image": [
      {
         "height": 1080,
         "url": "http://ericrovtar.com/images/posts/fitz-simmons.jpg",
         "width": 1920
      }
   ],

It's obviously seeing the proper height and width and they meet Facebook's minimum requirements, so I'm not sure what it's complaining about.

If someone could help me figure this out, that'd be great.

Shostakovich

Answer 1

that's a common problem, and is reported as bug in the Developers Forum, now and then. It may be that your image is too big and fails to load (or is being loaded too slowly). The image recommended by Facebook is, right now 600x600 pixels, if I remember correctly, and still we can at times find that problem with the Facebook Crawler (it says that the image is too small even if the resolution and size are correct). You can find the bug report that's currently open, and subscribe if you want, here: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/294523810715538/

Chronometer

Thanks. I thought maybe it had to do with Jekyll routing URLs or something. – Shostakovich

Answer 2

I added the additional meta data for images, listed here: http://ogp.me/ and that worked. Specifically:

<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/jpeg" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="400" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="300" />

But it did not work initially when my image was 366x363, even though that's about the min. 200x200. I had to double the size of the image, and then that worked. Way to go FB!

Foolscap

This in combination with making the picture 600x400 worked for me. – Cypriot

Answer 3

A very common problem when og:image debugging is an incorrect "og:url" value. Even trailing slashes & letter-case matter in the og:url value. It must be exactly the same as the one you are sharing in order for it to work.

I've also pasted this reply on the following bug report threads:

https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/511829238949092 https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/204880016332273

Vita

This solved the og-image problem for me. Thank you!! – Ironbound

Answer 4

What I've found out that Facebook scarple heavly relies on correct HTTP headers for images.

I had an image that didn't have Content type header and facebook threw the error in question. Once I fixed the content type header to the correct one ("image/png" in my case) then it began to work.

(One small amendment - that particular picture still didn't work as I think due to caching on Facebook side, but another similar image was fetched fine).

Slather

Guidelines for image sizes can be found here. Regards. – Kuvasz

Answer 5

I ran into the error posted in this question as well and the issue turned out to be that we were serving the webpage over SSL and the online had the non-secure og:image tag.

Website URL: https://ourpage.com/the-article

When we only had this tag on the page, the error from the question: og:image could not be downloaded or is too small Provided og:image could not be downloaded or is not big enough.:

<meta property='og:image' content='https://ourpage.com/img.jpg' />

When we added this tag to the page, the page validated properly:

<meta property='og:image:secure_url' content='https://ourpage.com/img.jpg' />

Papua