Annoying, Isn’t It?
I hate it when things beyond my control affect my clients’ web sites. Facebook is too-often one of those things. So when I received an email this morning from a client stating that Facebook wasn’t using his post’s featured image but was pulling other images from the site instead, I wasn’t surprised. But finding a solution to these issues is another matter.
The Featured Image Was Correct
My first suspicion was that the client hadn’t correctly set the featured image, or had forgotten to update the page after the image was set. Yet, upon inspection, the featured image existed and was displaying properly on the web site. Yet when I posted the URL to the post on the client’s Facebook page, only two image options were available. They happened to be from the front page and neither of them was the correct featured image.
So, on to Google… and the Diagnosis
After some time searching, I discovered the reason why this was occurring. Apparently, my client had initially published the post without a featured image. We use the Social plugin from Mailchimp/Crowd Favorite to automatically post his blog articles to Facebook. So Facebook did what it was supposed to. It grabbed a couple of images from the front page and offered those as options for the post. However, when the featured image was added later, Facebook continued to insist that only those two image options could be used. Here’s why…
When a post or page is shared on Facebook, it stores the images from that URL in its own cache to use in the future. Facebook is not going to look at that URL again for different images until their cache expires. And nobody outside Facebook really knows how long that will be (hours? days? weeks? months?). But there is a way to fix it…
The Solution
There is a little-known tool provided by Facebook that allows you to force it to look at your page or post again and refresh the Facebook image cache for that URL. Here it is:
http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
Add your URL in the box at the top of the page and Facebook will scan it for the new image to share and give you a preview of what your post/share will look like at the bottom. In my experience, you sometimes must submit the page more than once to get the correct image to show up. But in the end, it will, and your featured image will shine.
Nathan, thanks for doing the legwork for us. The fix to this little issue has eluded me for some time now. You are AWESOME!!
Great Article Nathan. I was having the same issue with a client site and the extra facebook tool did the trick. Keep the info coming!.
I’d known to do this, but not WHY to do this. Good to know.
Thanks so much for this, was wondering why facebook couldn’t see the featured picture, debug done and all pretty now. Is there a debug for pinterest as well which does the same thing??
Holy crap, man… I can’t believe that worked! You’re a genius. Thanks!
Thanks for simple but effective solution on featured images errors
I tried this with one of my blog post links, and it worked after the second time it scraped information! Thank you, now it’s showing me the featured image! However, does that mean i need to run each of my blog post links through Object Debugger for Facebook to always pull the featured image?
No, the tool is useful if you want to test what will show when a link is shared or if you want to force Facebook to recognize a change to the image it had previously scraped for the URL.
Hi Nathan,
I’m so glad I found your article with the link to this tool. It’s solved the issue I was having. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you!
This worked. Thank you! Very helpful.
This worked so easily! Thank you!!
You’re welcome. Glad it helped!
Thank you very much! I was having that same problem.
Thank you for this! What if zero images are showing up? I’ve scraped multiple times and nothing. What am I doing wrong?
If you’re not getting any images at all, and you do have a featured image set, it’s likely your theme is not providing Open Graph information in the header – so Facebook doesn’t know what to do.
Here are a couple of plugins that might help:
This one (https://wordpress.org/plugins/get-first-image-set-as-featured-image/) will grab the first image in your post and automatically set it as the featured image if one has not been set already. You don’t need to use this one if you have already manually set a featured image.
This one (https://wordpress.org/plugins/meta-tags-generator/) will add the correct open graph code to your header so the correct images will appear.
Good luck!
I just gotta say I LOVE YOU!, thank you for this!
Thank you Nathan!
Done and Done
Hello Nathan!
Great tip! 😀
Any way to do this automatically from the website? Otherwise, I need to do this every time I post a new post…!!
Thanks!
Ian
Ian, you should only have to go through this process if a post that was previously indexed by Facebook has been changed.
Thank you this was super helpful!!
Thank you so much for this information! It was just what I needed to fix my issue.
Aces! After struggling with this issue more than once, it’s great to finally know how to sort it quickly. Thank you so much for sharing, it’s really appreciated!
Thank you! This helped so much!
THANK YOU SO MUCH! So glad I ran across this! It worked like a charm!
Thank you, it worked and saved me a lot of time!
Unbelievable. It worked! Thank you.
thanks very much
As a thank you for this info, I would make you a big batch of macarons, or a gluten-free vegan chocolate cake that would knock your socks off, or a bunch of cushions for your sofa!! This has made me CRAZY for ages. You are a STAR…
Just had this problem for the first time, and this fixed it in a jiffy. THANK YOU so much.
Thank you this worked perfectly! And I love how you started the article: Annoying, isn’t it? YES! So happy to have a solution – thanks for figuring this out!
apparently I am the only one the re-scrapes aren’t working for. FB is locking me into the missing image box and there isn’t much I can do about it I suppose.
Hi, When debug a URL then it shows error that is “The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id”. It is necessary to have app id as to preview image?
That’s odd. I haven’t seen that before. I don’t believe I have an app ID on any of my sites and the debug works correctly.
I have been debugging and it looks ok, the featured images shows up in the debugging tool, but not on Facebook!! Going in circles now. Any tips??
Have you tried removing the link on Facebook and re-adding? Using the Facebook debug tool will not usually update the image on links that are already posted.
Thank you – it worked on the second scrape – mystery solved!!
I used debugger tool and found that in some articles the images is being shown while in some the images is not getting fetched. I think it has something to do with image size as well.
I’m not having any luck choosing the right plugin. It continues to show my header on my page, but not the featured image for my blog when I share? Any suggestions?
The issue isn’t likely a plugin but your theme not sending out opengraph information to Facebook properly. You might try adding the Yoast SEO plugin or this plugin that will often solve these opengraph issues: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wonderm00ns-simple-facebook-open-graph-tags/.
When I run the tool it says that I need to have an app created??
caution-solid Warnings That Should Be Fixed
Missing Properties
The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id
You may have to be logged into Facebook when you use the tool.
Thank you – it worked
Hi, I use All in one SEO, and manage to get the featured images to appear in Facebook. But I cannot get the StartPage Image to show despite I have tried the same solutions as on my article pages. Any tips for that?
It’s probably because a featured image isn’t defined for the home page. You can add a featured image on the page itself in the sidebar or use a plugin like Default Featured Image to set a fallback image in case one doesn’t exist.
Gratitude
It worked! Thank you so much for this Nathan.
Thanks. Your suggestion worked. My big problem now solved. Regards.
Thanks. Totally worked, and you are right, it was really frustrared.
Omg. I won’t say how long this took me but THANK YOU! This was so annoying!
Bless you! Hours into it, I am so very peaceful now.
I have been trying this a number of times and it still won’t show my feature image. How many times does it take to fix?
It can take several times in my experience. If it’s still not working after 5-7 attempts, perhaps you have some kind of WP or server cache that needs to be cleared?
I’ve been struggling for at least six hours on this and you’ve solved it in 10 minutes. You are now officially on my genius list (it’s a short list).
Thanks a million Nathan.
That’s awesome Paul! Really glad it worked for you.
Should it be necessary to re-post to Facebook after scraping before the correct image will display in people’s newsfeeds, or should scraping using the debugger fix the image displayed in posts that have already gone public?
Facebook unfortunately won’t go back and change the images that are already shared. If you want your post to reflect a new image, you’ll need to repost.
Thank you for this article! It got me started down the right path. There were extra problems that popped up at every step but FINALLY Facebook is showing the featured image now. I appreciate your help.
That’s awesome news Pearl! I’m glad it’s working for you.
This hasn’t worked for me. The image is pulled initially and the post looks good to go, but as soon as it is published, the image disappears. This also only happens on my FB page, and not on my personal account, which pulls the image without any problems. I also tried in Publishing Tools instead, but alas, the image is still not pulling when the post is published. In the URL you post above, it also shows the image, so I’m not sure what’s happening between drafting the post and publishing for the image to disappear. Very frustrating that we can’t share content direct from our website on our FB page.
Thank you for the detailed article. Finally, I fixed the issue.
THANK YOU!
Thank you for this great article our site experiencing the same issue ….
Not working for me. I tried close to 20 times, and it’s still showing the wrong picture.
Also, I’m getting this message:
“Warnings That Should Be Fixed
Missing Properties
The following required properties are missing: fb:app_id”
Maybe that’s why the debugging isn’t working?
Thanks so much, I can’t believe this worked so easily!!
This always worked for me for years but it doesn’t help anymore. “The ‘og:image’ property should be explicitly provided, even if a value can be inferred from other tags.” I tell it to scrape again and again and it just shows the generic blog image.