@hendione Facebook is a little tricky – sometimes it shows a thumbnail from your page, sometimes it doesn’t.  Usually if you have an image near the top of the post, it will pull from that.  I noticed with my photo blog that sometimes, Facebook would skip the photo (the biggest image on the page) and use a comment author’s gravatar as the thumbnail instead.  

This post by Ann Smarty (http://www.seosmarty.com/how-to-force-facebook-to-grab-the-best-image-from-your-page/) tells you how to force Facebook to pull the best image from any page or post on your website.  Hopefully that will help!

Hi Jon, it is a wordpress.com blog.   Although we may be switching it over to a .org blog in the future. 

Kristi, thanks I will check that link.  thanks!

Here’s another Facebook tip. If Facebook doesn’t seem to be doing what you expect, try refreshing the browser tab. (arrow in a circle or circling arrows) That usually gets you a working version of Facebook.

What you described happens to me a lot. If the refresh doesn’t work, I skip the update for now and come back in 15 minutes. I won’t post a link without an image.

Facebook does tend to cache and once it has a certain image, or several, it will stick to that. @ecumenix Thanks for the tip, I hadn’t tried that.@hendione Facebook is inconsistent with gathering images from an article. I share a lot through Plone, sometimes it gives me what I expect, other times it grabs every little GIF on the page except the image I want/need.

@kristi-hines Thanks for the link.., it’s bookmarked…

Hi, guys. If you want to ensure that the exact info and image you want from your blog post is being used by Facebook every time, no matter who is sharing, you need to implement Open Graph (OG) tags in your header info.

OG tags go in the same spot as other meta data tags (in the html header). I found two WordPress plugins for automating this a little bit

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/og
This will enable you to designate the exact headline, image and description that Facebook uses every time. *Also* other services (like mine, Kuratur) use OG tags to grab the info that the publisher wants them to use when sharing posts. So it’s a *very* good thing to add to your blog.

@hendione  I just took a look at my little WP.com blog, and they are already implementing OG tags automatically (yay!). You can see them on any post by viewing the source of the page and scanning through the header section.

On the other hand, if FB isn’t grabbing the info from your OG tags on your WP.com post, that’s perplexing. I ran a quick little test on my page, and it worked perfectly (which isn’t proof of much, amittedly).

I don’t think the plugins I mentioned work with Wp.com blogs, but that makes sense considering wp.com is already using OG tags.

If you share your URL here, I’ll take a look at it just to see if I see anything that might be helpful…

OK, after a bit of testing I think I have it figured out. Facebook does indeed seem to have a preference for one image format over another, in this order

1) jpg

2) png

3) gif

So, I think you might get great results by making sure that:

1) if you have more than one jpg on the page, make sure you have the one you want Facebook to use earliest on the page

2) if you have any other images on the page, make sure the one you want Facebook to use is in jpg format, because if it’s a gif and at the top, Facebook will pull the first jpg it finds (or png if there are no jpg’s).
OK, I hope I explained that well!  :)
The reason the the WP.com OG tags don’t solve the problem is because WP.com lists *all* your images in your OG tags, so that still leaves FB to choose which one it wants. If you had total control over your OG tags, and could set *only one* image in your OG tags, I believe then FB would not look for any other images not matter what format your designated image was in.