Facebook Share doesn't show my description or my thumbnail

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I have followed every single piece of advice I have found to try to get this to work but all of it has been to no avail. Can someone tell me why my description/thumbnail doesn't show up? Thanks. Below is my code and the link to the site:

Meta Tags:

<meta name="title" content="La Vita è Bella, because life is beautiful" />
<meta name="description" content="Drawing on Italy’s most famous export – great-tasting, healthy, colourful food – La Vita é Bella brings families together to experience mealtimes the Italian way." />

<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.lavitaebella.co.uk/images/imageforfacebook.jpg" />

Actual Link:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http://www.lavitaebella.co.uk" target="_blank"><img src='../images/share/s-fb.png' /></a>

http://www.lavitaebella.co.uk/

Thanks in advance for any help.

Twine answered 1/6, 2010 at 13:34 Comment(0)

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To those (like me) for whom the other answer did not work:

In the <head> and </head>section, add

<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.mathnuggets.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://www.mathnuggets.com/images/fb-logo.jpg" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Math website for your gifted student" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Challenging word problems for gifted elementary students" />`

Then go to FB Linter and enter your URL there to refresh FB's cache of your page.

^^^ Refreshing the cache is important.

Spendable answered 9/4, 2013 at 18:53 Comment(3)

I used below tags: <meta property="og:url" content="72.5.167.17:8003" /> <meta property="og:image" content="72.5.167.17:8003/img/header-logo.png" /> <meta property="og:title" content="This is my title" /> <meta property="og:description" content="This is my description" /> Title and Description successfully changed, but image is still not coming. – Domenech 20/2, 2014 at 9:56

@Gaurav123, is the 72.5.167.17:8003 accessible from the internet or is that only for your local env? Can you access it through the FB Linter? What error does Linter give you? – Spendable 26/2, 2014 at 21:41

Yes its accessible (from internet) 72.5.167.17:8003/img/header-logo.png. I did not get any error, but the image was not replaced. Image size was 526px * 361px , but its displaying that image size should be atleast 200px*200px – Domenech 27/2, 2014 at 6:29

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--2nd EDIT--

Please note that this answer doesn't work any more and is out of date. Please try the above answer.

-- ORIGINAL ANSWER--

Got it sorted. Had to use a url that is chock full of craziness:

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s= 100&amp;p[title]=La Vita È Bella&amp;p[url]=http://www.lavitaebella.co.uk/teachers/resources.html&amp;p[images][0]=http://www.lavitaebella.co.uk/images/imageforfacebook.gif&amp;p[summary]=Drawing on Italy’s most famous export – great-tasting, healthy, colourful food – La Vita é Bella brings families together to experience mealtimes the Italian way"><img src='../images/share/s-fb.png' /></a>

--EDIT--

As some extra information, I can't remember where I originally found this information but here's what the s=100 part means:

The basic approach is you are providing a link to http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100 which is the basic share page (typically this is shown in a popup).

But I tried changing the numbers and it still goes to the same place.

As for the &p, it's just html code for &p and I think this is the array that Facebook dissects to get at the information.

Twine answered 4/6, 2010 at 16:36 Comment(10)

Epic! Been looking for this answer like crazy. Thanks! – Vietcong 11/8, 2010 at 2:14

Dude, you deserve way more up-votes. This helped me out quite a lot. – Seto 22/6, 2011 at 7:46

great post, much appreciated! – Pithead 12/7, 2011 at 17:10

Any idea how to add a redirect_uri and/or close a share popup after the user shares? (I tried adding [redirect_uri] to the end of the string, but no go. Thanks! – Illmannered 6/2, 2012 at 17:52

Folks I have a question: @Twine has given in his answer the path to a single image file through p[images][0]="<URL>"... I need to give multiple images, how do I do that? I tried p[images][0]="<URL1>"&p[images][1]="<URL2>" but it didn't work – Tlingit 25/4, 2012 at 21:4

Doesn't seem to be working now. I was able to get it to work using the og:title, etc. meta tags though. Had to ping it with the FB linter to get it to refresh though. – Mnemosyne 25/5, 2012 at 0:11

Following the aforementioned method, I've added successfully a link to a Flash application by using the href parameters. Heaven, after not being able to make the 'og:blah' metatags work. – Abuttals 25/5, 2012 at 1:21

Facebook just changed how sharing is supposed to work and the above method no longer leads to expected results. It seems that using metatags with the property="og:title" is the only way of doing it right. – Manuscript 19/12, 2013 at 10:41

Its not working anymore. Can anyone suggest other way? – Decolonize 25/2, 2015 at 16:28

I think you should add the disclaimer that it isn't working anymore to the top of the post. – Kristlekristo 2/4, 2015 at 4:40

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