Donna Barstow Blog #2 Posts

Thumbnails not showing on Facebook

This isn’t a little bug or glitch, this is serious business nowadays! Anyone with the intelligence of a teenager knows 1) the importance of Facebook as social media supreme, whether you like it or not , and 2) importance of images in every blog, site and outlet in the whole world. As we artists have always known. :)

This problem of no thumbnails on Facebook had been going on for some 3 weeks for my new blog of chocolate cartoons, Dark.? Every time I tried to post a link on Facebook, in either my personal Facebook page, or my chocolate book page, I would get the ugly blue no-show icon. Not the best draw for visitors when you are starting a new art blog.

I finally had to find an answer. I had been blaming my theme (template, for you non – WordPress people), which is Elegant Grunge. It has fancy and quite attractive frames around each image. As everyone who does SEO knows, frames used to be lethal for indexing by Google and other scrapers, as bots couldn’t read the text or see images through frames. Now, Google has grown up, and has been indexing my images just fine, so why couldn’t Facebook see them?

But it wasn’t just Facebook who wouldn’t show thumbnails; bitly wouldn’t index images, either, which is on my backend. Not public, but still annoying when I am trying to keep track of posts.

So I started hunting for info on images in frames for a few days, and couldn’t find anything helpful. Either Elegant Grunge is the only theme that uses frames on images (not true) or no one else had a problem with them. I found Fix, on ansonalex.com, to be helpful, and finally started trying his suggestions there, one by one. Here are his suggestions that I tried:

• Installed the Add Facebook Share Thumbnail + Meta Plugin. Nothing.
• Even with the plugin, you have to add another line of code.? I think this was when my bitly links suddenly showed thumbnails, but nothing on Facebook yet.
• The images were named properly, so that was okay.
• Alex Anson at Fix suggests adding 3 lines of code to your header. I thought my title and description were fine, but added this one, just in case: <link rel=”image_src” type=”
  image/jpeg” href=”
  http://www.yourdomain.com/image/path.jpg

  “/> No change. (Also, I’m a dummy nerd, I guess, because I wasn’t sure what the actual code should be. Do I keep image and path in the code?)

• Removed the http and the final /on the post url, as he suggested last. No change. Feeling discouraged…
  Read MoreProblem adding thumbnail to Facebook?