Facebook linter reports og:image is too small, when it is larger than the image it choose instead

Question

Problem:

• linter reports that specified og:image is too small. Image is 628x464.
• linter instead picks a random image from the page which is 380x214, smaller than the og:image!

What the linter shows me:

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=futuremark.com

Background:

We have been happily using 130x110 og:images without problems for the last 9 months. I noticed in the last couple of weeks that pages were no longer sharing the correct image. Using the linter it seems that Facebook recently decided og:images should be at least 200x200. So I have been replacing our og:images with larger examples but the linter still says they are too small.

Any ideas how I can fix this, or is it a Facebook problem? Thanks.

Autosuggestion

I had this. Basically, it won't work (and this bug is status wontfix) if the URL results in a redirect. Also the debug tool somehow seems slow/delayed and does seem to cache some stuff. Hit the button a few times and you get different results, even without changing the site. – Haga

Answer 1

Now I guess that Facebook does not find tags for height and width and considers them null. In my case, next tags fixed this issue:

<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/jpeg" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1280" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="855" />

Amaya

Answer 2

Did you change how big the image file at http://www.futuremark.com/images/facebook/futuremark-logo.png is without changing the URL specified in the og:image meta tag?

The image itself will be cached if the URL didn't change, so you need to change the URL (or add a cash-busting parameter like ?v=1 to the end)

Cashmere

Thanks for the reply. The URL is the same but the image is different. The image is used for many pages on the site so I didn't want to have to go and change the URL on every page. I thought the act of using the linter was supposed to clear the cache? – Autosuggestion

Update: I tried adding ?v=1 to the image URL. Same problem, linter says og:image is too small: developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/… – Autosuggestion

There's a bug report here: ( developers.facebook.com/bugs/338739036234971 ) saying that if the image URL returns a HTTP 301 redirect to a different URL that the size isn't corrected - does that sound like the issue here – Cashmere

Yes, that could be the issue. I'll check with our developers. Thanks again for your help. – Autosuggestion

Answer 3

I ran into this same issue, for me the problem was with the URL defined in the og:image not matching the URL being checked

for example my og:image tag had

<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.soundfuse.co.uk/public/images/logo_300px.png"/>

And the URL I was actually checking against was

http://soundfuse.co.uk

Notice the missing www. on the TLD? This caused a 301 redirect to occur from soundfuse.co.uk to www.soundfuse.co.uk, but once I matched both primary URL's up it worked as expected.

Fayalite

Answer 4

This issue is also triggered if you're enforcing no trailing slashes with .htaccess [301]. Facebook infers this slash if no og:url is present.

Engobe

Answer 5

There is a useful workaround for this issue. If you use a URL shortener to create a new URL, the image seems to load without error.

For example, paste your Youtube URL into bitly.com's URL shortener, then paste the shortened URL into Facebook. The thumbnail image will then be displayed as intended.

Pupiparous

Answer 6

Please see the link below for facebook open graph image cache problem: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/?locale=en_US#images

It says that:

URL for the image. To update an image after it's been published, use a new URL for the new image. Images are cached based on the URL and won't be updated unless the URL changes.

So, to sum up, if you already have an open graph image that is indexed by facebook and if you would like update it, you should change the URL.

Sophistic