Facebook image selection for links

[Jade Elizabeth]

When I link to my site it shows me one picture I can link up as the picture for the link, and that picture is always in the footer.

Is there a way I can get FB to recognize avatars and pictures inside the post?

[Biology Forums]

Curious about this too...

[Jade Elizabeth]

You're having the same issues as me? I've been saving the picture and using the "upload picture" option but it's a pain in the butt!

[Biology Forums]

Yea, of course, or it finds 4 random images on that page and it's hit-or-miss if one of them is the one I'm interested in.

There has to be some sort of marking on the <img that FB looks for.

[Suki]

There is if you use facebook "Open Graph" https://developers.facebook.com/docs/web/share

You need to add lots of stuff to your pages: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/web/webmasters

and its really difficult to get it done right for forum topics.

I remember there was a mod here that implemented the open graph stuff, it probably don't work properly by now but you can use it as reference to know just how many changes are needed to make it work on a forum's topic.

Additionally, if you follow all their suggtestions, theres still the chance it won't work properly anyway,  due to how facebook crwals your site using their own bots, it spossible that facebook will mark all your topics as one single unique page and thus it will use the very first image that was crawled from your site.

[Biology Forums]

That does look intense.

[Jade Elizabeth]

Is there a way to make it use the site logo or something then? That would be better. maybe we can make it a hidden value or something. It seems like a lot of bull crap for us to go through to make our sites work with theirs - they should be doing that not us!!

[Biology Forums]

Here's what I've done. Pretty much it rotates randomly between three images of my choosing. I put this in the header section inside index.template.php.

Code Select Expand


// Set meta tags...

$bio_icon = '<meta property="og:image" content="'.$settings['default_theme_url'].'/images/biology.png" />';
$bchem_icon = '<meta property="og:image" content="'.$settings['default_theme_url'].'/images/biochemistry.png" />';
$other_icon = '<meta property="og:image" content="'.$settings['default_theme_url'].'/images/others.png" />';

// Put into an array...

$values = array($bio_icon, $bchem_icon, $other_icon);

// Randomize

$FB_image_tag = $values[array_rand($values)];

// Publish

echo'<!--Facebook-related tags-->',$FB_image_tag,'';

Let me know if you need help incorporating that.

[Jade Elizabeth]

Hey that is awesome! Thank you!!

[Biology Forums]

Hope it works.