Thumbnails not showing up on LinkedIn share posts

Question

We've set up a new mini-site with extensive social sharing, including LinkedIn. Lots of OpenGraph tagging, the works. We have chosen specific images to be shown when sharing by using the og:image meta property.

The images work fine on Facebook and Pinterest, but are not working properly on LinkedIn. Here's the OG image tagging:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://img.mshanken.com/d/wso/Articles/2016/ST_TheBreakers070516_1600.jpg">

But if you click the LinkedIn icon we have set up at the bottom of our page, you end up on a share page that looks like this, which does NOT show the image:

Weirder still, if you inspect that share preview, the image IS in the source code:

<div class="image-thumbs-container">
<img src="https://media.licdn.com/media-proxy/ext?w=180&amp;h=110&amp;f=c&amp;hash=q0uvWygJS2HJrhZZ2qZGdYu2Tig%3D&amp;ora=1%2CaFBCTXdkRmpGL2lvQUFBPQ%2CxAVta5g-0R6jnhxUzw8p4aCKqEH-50hKCoaTFXP-RFTovozTPCKqZsXfeLS-xzl5HHRU4kZnLrT9AnPhFZO5KoyAfNpxi4m_ZMc" width="130" alt="Preview of the share image" data-orig-url="https://img.mshanken.com/d/wso/Articles/2016/ST_TheBreakers070516_1600.jpg" data-width="" data-height="" data-size="" data-position="1" class="active">    
</div>

What do we need to do to get that image showing up on LinkedIn shares?

Pontus

Answer 1

I was having the same issue last night. Spent hours researching solutions. Finally I contacted LinkedIn about this issue and they responded right away. Their development team has implemented a new tool called "Post Inspector", which allows you to optimize content sharing. Literally, in just minutes this worked.

All you have to do is type in your URL and they do all the busy work i.e. verifying correct code of properties such as image, author, title, description, publication date etc. Not only do they verify, they also tell you what to include and what is missing.

Here is the website to use Post Inspector:

https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/

Dowery

This isn't working for shares submitted through the api. – Lactoprotein

yeah @chovy, did u figure it out? im currently faced with the same issue – Viperine

Nope. never did. I filed a ticket and zero movement. – Lactoprotein

Answer 2

Couple of things it could be:

1. The dimensions 1600x900 and size of 220kb are within LinkedIn's requirements. However, your aspect is 16:9 instead of 4:1 / 1:4.

• Max file size: 1 MB
• Minimum image dimensions: 80 x 150 pixels
• Recommended aspect ratio: 4:1 or 1:4

Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

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2. Your image URI is https, it could be they are unable to retrieve your image. Have you tried with an http image?

Note: If the image meets the requirements, but it still does not appear in updates on LinkedIn, your website may be blocking us from pulling the image or the image may be located on a protected directory or website.

Making Your Website Shareable on LinkedIn

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3. Was the image change from the first time LinkedIn crawled your page for the image? They do cache for ~7 days.

The first time that LinkedIn's crawlers visit a webpage when asked to share content via a URL, the data it finds (Open Graph values or our own analysis) will be cached for a period of approximately 7 days.

This means that if you subsequently change the article's description, upload a new image, fix a typo in the title, etc., you will not see the change represented during any subsequent attempts to share the page until the cache has expired and the crawler is forced to revisit the page to retrieve fresh content.

Shared Content Caching

Ennoble

Wow, never got an email from SO letting me know this was here. Will try some of these and mark as accepted answer if they work. – Pontus

Here are the image requirements specific to the LinkedIn sharing module: Max file size: 5 MB Minimum image dimensions: 1200 (w) x 627 (h) pixels Recommended ratio: 1.91:1 – Refrigeration

Answer 3

Chiming in from the future - I faced this issue today as our site update wasn't displaying the proper image. In my case the solution was simple: try posting the link like so: https://url.com/?jhskjsh and it forced linked in to fetch the meta tags again which then displayed my image, as opposed to the grey square it previously had.

Foretopmast