facebookfacebook-opengraphimage
I use ImageResizer.net to create images to dimensions I need dynamically, based on one larger source image. It's done in a url-like fashion, like so: "www.siteUrl.com/ImagePath/ImageName.jpg?width=90&height=90&crop=auto&quality=90". This resizes the image to 90×90 pixels, cropping, and setting jpeg quality to 90%.
Will this url be acceptable to og:image , so that when someone likes/links to my content within Facebook it shows a thumbnail of the image inside the og:image property?
Here's what I created to hold the images that my app is currently displaying. Please note that the "Log" object in use here is my custom wrapper around the final Log class inside Android.
package com.wilson.android.library;
/*
Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file
distributed with this work for additional information
regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file
to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
software distributed under the License is distributed on an
"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations
under the License.
*/
import java.io.IOException;
public class DrawableManager {
private final Map<String, Drawable> drawableMap;
public DrawableManager() {
drawableMap = new HashMap<String, Drawable>();
}
public Drawable fetchDrawable(String urlString) {
if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) {
return drawableMap.get(urlString);
}
Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "image url:" + urlString);
try {
InputStream is = fetch(urlString);
Drawable drawable = Drawable.createFromStream(is, "src");
if (drawable != null) {
drawableMap.put(urlString, drawable);
Log.d(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "got a thumbnail drawable: " + drawable.getBounds() + ", "
+ drawable.getIntrinsicHeight() + "," + drawable.getIntrinsicWidth() + ", "
+ drawable.getMinimumHeight() + "," + drawable.getMinimumWidth());
} else {
Log.w(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "could not get thumbnail");
}
return drawable;
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
return null;
} catch (IOException e) {
Log.e(this.getClass().getSimpleName(), "fetchDrawable failed", e);
return null;
}
}
public void fetchDrawableOnThread(final String urlString, final ImageView imageView) {
if (drawableMap.containsKey(urlString)) {
imageView.setImageDrawable(drawableMap.get(urlString));
}
final Handler handler = new Handler() {
@Override
public void handleMessage(Message message) {
imageView.setImageDrawable((Drawable) message.obj);
}
};
Thread thread = new Thread() {
@Override
public void run() {
//TODO : set imageView to a "pending" image
Drawable drawable = fetchDrawable(urlString);
Message message = handler.obtainMessage(1, drawable);
handler.sendMessage(message);
}
};
thread.start();
}
private InputStream fetch(String urlString) throws MalformedURLException, IOException {
DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpGet request = new HttpGet(urlString);
HttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(request);
return response.getEntity().getContent();
}
}
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:
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">
Best Answer
I've recently use URLs with some query string parameters for the og:image and it works fine for me.
In case you didn't know:
Facebook provides a debug tool, which allows you to check which OpenGraph meta data could be fetched from a certain domain: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug