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I know it's possible to tell Facebook to use a certain image when sharing a page by adding a meta tag. But I was wondering if the opposite is possible: telling facebook NOT to user a certain image as the thumbnail when sharing a page.

I am asking this question because when I share a link from my site it always shows some image I use in the footer first (as the default thumbnail), which is bad :) so I want Facebook to ignore that specific image when sharing.

Thanks in advance!

Wouter DB
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  • Thanks for posting this question, please share if you have got any better solution for this problem. – Akki Mar 11 '14 at 21:46

2 Answers2

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This is a little hackish but it worked for me. So the only criteria that facebook uses to ignore images is the width to height ratio, all other images in your page will get picked up and will be an option as a thumbnail. So what I did is expose the undesirable images as css in a div tag, instead of as an tag. Then facebook won't picked them up.

fmizzell
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I'm afraid this is not possible. Why don't you do the opposite of the opposite, and set an image to force facebook using that specific one?

So if you don't want to always set an image, make a default image to be used for facebook sharing everywhere unless otherwise specified.

ifaour
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    Thanks for the reply, I had already considered doing something like you suggested but thought there had to be a better way :) Is Facebook "getting" the images from a page in a specific order? Maybe I can play around with that, because I find it odd that an image that is in the footer, of all places, is the default suggested one... – Wouter DB Jan 27 '11 at 18:10
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    the issue is that the header/footer might contain an image which is big -- to allow the printed page to contain a nice header/footer -- the one solution i see is to use css instead -- if an image above a certain size is in the page, the sharing style is changed from small (square) to big (header) style. the criteria seems to be: width of one image bigger that 400px -- causing smaller images to be ignored by the sharer – ebricca Dec 03 '13 at 10:12
  • @ebricca: I am facing same the problem, Currently when I share any link on facebook from my website only single image is rendered as a preview image for any link and the image which is rendered is of Footer content which I dont want to show as a preview.Is it a good solution to reduce footer image resolution ? what would you prefer ebricca ? what should I do to skip this image as preview for any link ? – Akki Mar 11 '14 at 21:45
  • @Akki: i would just declare the footer as a "css background image" on a "div" element .. facebook doesnt see it that way. about the preview image .. i would nowadays specifically define just 1 big image via an og tag per page (hook it into the cms) – ebricca Mar 14 '14 at 14:47