Facebook Share not finding og:image tag

Question

I'm trying to figure out how the Facebook share protocol is getting the images it is.

Example article: http://www.startribune.com/sleepy-eye-quads-celebrate-65th-birthday/302364361/

As of right now (8 May 2015 1:00pm CDT), plugging that URL into https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object/ it gives the following warning: og:image was not defined, could not be downloaded or was not big enough. Please define a chosen image using the og:image metatag, and use an image that's at least 200x200px and is accessible from Facebook. Image 'http://stmedia.stimg.co/obed021814.JPG?w=600&h=600' will be used instead.

However, further down on the page in the 'Based on the raw tags, we constructed the following Open Graph properties' part of the page, it clearly shows the correct image that is in the og:image tag that is on the page.

Why would Open Graph think og:image is not defined or not be able to access the image when clearly farther down the page it can find it?

The meta tags within the header are as follows:

    <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.startribune.com/sleepy-eye-quads-celebrate-65th-birthday/302364361/" />
    <meta property="og:url" content="http://www.startribune.com/sleepy-eye-quads-celebrate-65th-birthday/302364361/" />
    <meta property="og:title" content="Sleepy Eye quads celebrate 65th birthday" />
    <meta property="og:site_name" content="Star Tribune" />
    <meta name="news_keywords" content="" />
    <meta name="description" content="The Sleepy Eye quads have returned to their childhood home in southern Minnesota to celebrate their 65th birthday." />
    <meta property="og:description" content="The Sleepy Eye quads have returned to their childhood home in southern Minnesota to celebrate their 65th birthday."/>
    <meta property="og:image" content="http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/1430701562_10026501+Quads+Birthday.JPG" />
</head>

I send the image URL http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/1430701562_10026501+Quads+Birthday.JPG itself through the debug tool a couple of times, which only gave error messages as well – but somehow that seems to trigger something internally, because now for the actual page URL the debug tool shows no more warnings, and shows the correct image as thumbnail. If this is not an isolated incident however, but happens on a regular basis for other articles/images on your site as well(?), then you’ll have to investigate a little further what might be causing this. — CBroe

ifaour ifaour · Accepted Answer · 2015-05-12T13:52:19

It's always good to run all links related to a page in the Facebook Debugger as mentioned by @CBroe.

As for issues with images specifically, I would also recommend you add the og:image:width and og:image:height meta tags if possible to help the crawler crawl your image as per this doc.

If you have other pages facing the same issue, I would supplied the mentioned tags before trying to run the image url itself in the debugger and see if that helps.

Facebook Share not finding og:image tag

1 Answers