Gray bar for image when posting to feed

Question

When I generate a feed post using the FB.ui function I find that frequently the image I attach to the post displays as a vertical gray bar. On the other hand, if I generate my feed posts using the direct https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed url the image works 100% of the time. If I provide the Facebook Debugger it detects it as a Photo and displays the image at the bottom. When I click the 'See exactly what our scraper sees for your URL' it says that the 'Document returned no data'. I assume this is because my image is not an open graph object? I'm very much at a loss here.

Answer 1

The issue was our server, it was becoming inaccessible from the outside intermittently. This was causing Facebook to cache the broken links.

Answer 2

maybe try to add a random parameter after the image src like http://www.yourdomain.tld/yourimage.ext?randomnumber if Facebook tried to load that image when it didn't exists it will cache a 404 error. With a random parameter, it forces Facebook to refresh your picture.

Answer 3

You shouldn't provide a direct link to the image.

Utilize OpenGraph tags, e.g. share link yourwebsite.com?image=12. Use backend script to generate OG headers, namely: og:image, og:description (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/ for more information). This way every time someone shares the content you know what image is being displayed.