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When using Facebook Sharer, Facebook will offer the user the option of using 1 of a few images pulled from the source as a preview for their link. How are these images selected, and how can I ensure that any particular image on my page is always included in this list?

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How do I tell Facebook which image to use when my page gets shared?

Facebook has a set of open-graph meta tags that it looks at to decide which image to show.

The keys one for the Facebook image are:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="https://secure.example.com/ogp.jpg" />

and it should be present inside the <head></head> tag at the top of your page.

If these tags are not present, it will look for their older method of specifying an image: <link rel="image_src" href="/myimage.jpg"/>. If neither are present, Facebook will look at the content of your page and choose images from your page that meet its share image criteria: Image must be at least 200px by 200px, have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1, and in PNG, JPEG or GIF format.

Can I specify multiple images to allow the user to select an image?

Yes, you just need to add multiple image meta tags in the order you want them to appear in. The user will then be presented with an image selector dialog:
Facebook Image Selector

I specified the appropriate image meta tags. Why isn't Facebook accepting the changes?

Once a url has been shared, Facebook's crawler, which has a user agent of facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+https://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php), will access your page and cache the meta information. To force Facebook servers to clear the cache, use the Facebook Url Debugger / Linter Tool that they launched in June 2010 to refresh the cache and troubleshoot any meta tag issues on your page.

Also, the images on the page must be publicly accessible to the Facebook crawler. You should specify absolute url's like http://example.com/yourimage.jpg instead of just /yourimage.jpg.

Can I update these meta tags with client side code like Javascript or jQuery? No. Much like search engine crawlers, the Facebook scraper does not execute scripts so whatever meta tags are present when the page is downloaded are the meta tags that are used for image selection.

Adding these tags causes my page to no longer validate. How can I fix this?

You can add the necessary Facebook namespaces to your tag and your page should then pass validation:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="https://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
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    Another place it looks: <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="..."> (That's how it gets the SO image)
    – Yarin
    Commented Mar 4, 2012 at 3:22
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    @Yarin I'm not sure that is true. StackOverflow has the image_src property set, which is the one it is using. The file name for the apple-touch-icon is different and isn't being used.
    – bkaid
    Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 17:56
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    Can I choose the order the image? In my case, another images appear before the image of meta tags.
    – vicenrele
    Commented May 15, 2013 at 12:01
  • 23
    Minimum image size is now 200x200px.
    – Tr1stan
    Commented Jun 20, 2013 at 16:49
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    Woot! I've set the img's size to 300px, now it seems to work. Thanks @Tr1stan
    – Urs
    Commented Sep 18, 2013 at 13:04
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When you share for Facebook, you have to add in your html into the head section next meta tags: 

<meta property="og:title" content="title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="description" />
<meta property="og:image" content="thumbnail_image" />

And that's it!

Add the button as you should according to what FB tells you.

All the info you need is in www.facebook.com/share/

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29

As of 2013, if you're using facebook.com/sharer.php (PHP) you can simply make any button/link like:

<a class="btn" target="_blank" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100&amp;p[title]=<?php echo urlencode(YOUR_TITLE);?>&amp;p[summary]=<?php echo urlencode(YOUR_PAGE_DESCRIPTION) ?>&amp;p[url]=<?php echo urlencode(YOUR_PAGE_URL); ?>&amp;p[images][0]=<?php echo urlencode(YOUR_LINK_THUMBNAIL); ?>">share on facebook</a>

Link query parameters:

p[title] = Define a page title
p[summary] = An URL description, most likely describing the contents of the page
p[url] = The absolute URL for the page you're sharing 
p[images][0] = The URL of the thumbnail image to be used as post thumbnail on facebook

It's plain simple: you do not need any js or other settings. Is just an HTML raw link. Style the A tag in any way you want to.

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  • p[images][0] was exactly what I needed. og tags work for sharing the same image but I need to share multiple images from the same page.
    – thekingoftruth
    Commented Dec 17, 2013 at 23:33
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    This should be the new 'accepted answer' - so simple and straightforward. Thanks for this, mate.
    – Mike
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 20:40
  • Antonio, do you have a source link about what you shown above? I am trying to look this in developers.facebook.com but unable to find anything except this. Please help.
    – Mr_Green
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 10:26
  • @Mr_Green that's about it. This feature was 'deprecated' but now is back to the official docs. Anyway, I believe my answer covers the basic settings for it to work.
    – Antonio Max
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 11:01
  • @AntonioMax please explain what is s=100 in your post?
    – Mr_Green
    Commented Mar 17, 2014 at 11:20
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From my experience, the http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php does not use meta tags. It uses the string you pass. See below.

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s=100&p[title]=THIS IS MY TITLE&p[summary]=THIS IS MY SUMMARY&p[url]=http://www.MYURL.com&&p[images][0]=http://www.MYURL.com/img/IMAGEADDRESS

The meta tags work with Facebook's developer like/send buttons, as does the other Open Graph info. So if you use one of Facebook's actual elements like the comments and such, that will all tie into the Open Graph stuff.

UPDATE: There are two ways to use the sharer * note the ?s versus the ?u value in the query string
1 ==> STRING: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?s + content from above
~~> Will pull info from the string.
2 ==> URL: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=url where url equals an actual url
~~> Will scrape the page provided in the url value
~~> You can test test the values here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

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  • Is there any legal way to use that sharer in another website to get the contents from a url ? I don't know much about facebook API and stuff...
    – Adrien Gorrell
    Commented Sep 20, 2013 at 1:01
  • Try using the URL option. If the page has OG tags, FB will scrape them. Test the page you want use here: developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
    – Jason Lydon
    Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 14:39
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Put the following tag in the head:

<link rel="image_src" href="/path/to/your/image"/>

From http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php

As far as what it chooses as the default in the absence of this tag, I'm not sure.

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Old way, no longer works:

<link rel="image_src" href="http://yoururl/yourimage"/>

Reported new way, also does not work:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://yoururl/yourimage"/>

It randomly worked off and on during the first day I implemented it, hasn't worked at all since.

The Facebook linter page, a utility that inspects your page, reports that everything is correct and does display the thumbnail I selected... just that the share.php page itself doesn't seem to be functioning. Has to be a bug over at Facebook, one they apparently don't care to fix as every bug report regarding this issue I've seen in their system all say resolved or fixed.

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  • I am also having this problem. The linter reports no error and shows my image correctly, but when I click the share button on my site there is absolutely no image in the share interface.
    – Luke Griffiths
    Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 11:56
  • image_src no longer works for Facebook, BUT some service still use it (Telegram clients, etc)
    – Andres SK
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 15:56
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To change Title, Description and Image, we need to add some meta tags under head tag.

STEP 1 :
Add meta tags under head tag 

<html>
<head>
    <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.test.com/" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="http://www.test.com/img/fb-logo.png" />
    <meta property="og:title" content="Prepaid Phone Cards, low rates for International calls with Lucky Prepay" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="Cheap prepaid Phone Cards. Low rates for international calls anywhere in the world." />

NEXT STEP :
Click on below link
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Add your URL in text box (e.g http://www.test.com/) where you mentioned the tags. Click on DEBUG button.

Its done.

You can verify here https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.test.com/

In above url, u = your website link

ENJOY !!!!

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  • The debugger was helpful.
    – konsolebox
    Commented Jun 5, 2016 at 8:38
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For secure HTTPS 

<meta property="og:image:secure_url" content="https://image.path.png" />
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Use facebook feed dialog instead of share dialog to show custom Images

Example:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=1389892087910588
&redirect_uri=https://scotch.io
&link=https://scotch.io
&picture=http://placekitten.com/500/500
&caption=This%20is%20the%20caption
&description=This%20is%20the%20description
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I had this problem and fixed it with manuel-84's suggestion. Using a 400x400px image worked great, while my smaller image never showed up in the sharer.

Note that Facebook recommends a minimum 200px square image as the og:image tag: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/howtos/maximizing-distribution-media-content/#tags

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This is what worked for me: I placed the desired thumbnail image on the page right after the tag and making it too small to see..

<img src="imagename.jpg" width="1" height="1" />

I have not tested it with height 0 and width 0 but it probably will still work.. This does not guarantee the user will select this image..

ALSO it seems like Facebook caches the thumbnails on your page and doesnt always check it for new ones.. try adding this to another page on your site and you'll see that it works.

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    after the tag – do you mean: "after the BODY tag"?
    – Alexis Wilke
    Commented Feb 16, 2014 at 3:38
  • Yes, I believe that's what they mean. I did this on a site a long time ago, but used style="display:none;" instead of setting it to 1x1 pixels.
    – Mike
    Commented Feb 24, 2014 at 20:44
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I couldn't get Facebook to pick the right image from a specific post, so I did what's outlined on this page:

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/18468/adding-meta-tags-to-individual-blogger-posts

In other words, something like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://urlofyourpost.com"'>
  <meta content='http://urlofyourimage.png' property='og:image'/>
 </b:if>

Basically, you're going to hard code an if statement into your site's HTML to get it to change the meta content for whatever you've changed for that one post. It's a messy solution, but it works.

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