For some reason over the past 2 or 3 weeks, when sharing posts from my music blog at arcadianforest.com to Facebook, the shared post would not display the correct thumbnail assigned to the post. I’m not sure if they have changed things up over at Facebook or what the issue was, but I dove into the issue to try and figure out the problem.
First step – I verified through looking at the code that all of my Facebook Open Graph Meta tags were in place and I ensured the thumbnails were at a required minimum of 200px by 200px. The recommended size is 1500px x 1500px but I’m not sacrificing 2 Mb (in this particular case) just to have my post image displayed on Facebook. The Facebook Open Graph Meta tags can be entered into the <head> of the page, or in my case with a WordPress blog, I opted to use a plugin to enter the meta tags based on my blog post. I’m still experimenting with several plugins in providing the best results without loading other unnecessary junk included with the plugin.
Second step – after verifying my image size and tags were in place, I began using the Facebook Debugger tool with several of my posts for troubleshooting and received various results, even with the same plugin and with the same image size. In some cases, the post would check out OK, while in other cases, the tool would tell me that the image was too small.
To make a long story short, I found that it makes a difference in how the file was being saved from PhotoShop (or not). To test this, I took a post that I tested with the FB Debugger tool and told me that the image was too small. I saved the image from the post, opened it in PhotoShop and used the “Save for web” option at 100% optimized, uploaded the new version, inserted the new image into the post and rechecked the same post with the new image and now the post checked out OK.
I also tested by downloading an online image temporarily – then of course deleted the image after testing due to copyright issues ;-) – used the image in a post and FB debugged it, and received the “too small” error message. I opened the same image in PhotoShop, resaved it, uploaded and add it to the post, redebugged it and it checked out OK.
In both cases, I reconfirmed that the thumbnail was working properly by posting on Facebook to see if the thumbnail appeared and after saving the file in Photoshop, and reuploading, they did in each case I tested.
Hope this troubleshooting information will help someone that may run into the same issue … and frustration.
