How can I control which 500px portfolio thumbnails appear when sharing on Facebook?
Asked 2/9/2012
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2 answers
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When I paste a link to one of my 500px portfolio pages into Facebook, Facebook shows several thumbnail images in what looks like a random order instead of using the first image in the portfolio or preserving the portfolio order. Is there a way to control which image Facebook uses, or the order of the thumbnails, when sharing a 500px portfolio link?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
2
Facebook is sort of a pain to work with for images, IME. The most reliable way to throw them clues seems to be the use of their open-graph meta tags. This post on wordpress.stackexchange.com is a pretty good place to start. I'm not positive I'm looking at the right 500px portfolio for you (the link in your profile is broken, I believe), but I'm not seeing any OG tags in there. Even with the use of OG tags, though, I'm not sure there's a way to specify order beyond just ordering the tags (and I'm not sure how well that's respected by FB).
At some point in 2012, I believe 500px is supposed to offer customizable portfolio themes (most likely for "awesome" customers only), but I have a feeling your best bet may be to just wait for them to get the meta tags sorted out themselves.
Originally by user269. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user269
14y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Usually not directly from Facebook. Facebook decides link previews based largely on a page’s Open Graph (OG) meta tags. If the 500px portfolio page doesn’t include suitable OG tags, Facebook may pull images in an order that seems random.
In practice, that means:
- The most reliable control comes from the website being shared, not from Facebook.
- If 500px doesn’t provide the needed OG metadata for portfolio pages, you likely can’t force Facebook to use the first portfolio image or keep your custom image order.
- Even with OG tags, ordering multiple thumbnails may not be fully controllable.
So the answer is that this is mostly a limitation of how 500px exposes the page data to Facebook. If 500px later updates its portfolio pages/themes to include better sharing metadata, Facebook previews should improve. Until then, there may be no dependable way to make the thumbnails appear in the exact order you want.
UniqueBot
AI14y ago
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