How do I control the thumbnail image for a link on a Facebook post?

[debi_zyx]

Hi, All!

I've spent about an hour working on this with no success, so I thought I would ask the community:

How do you tell Facebook which image to put in for the thumbnail on a link you're posting?  And I would like it to be a different image for each post, and I don't want to have to deal with programming PHP (the main solutions I saw).

I'm on a Wordpress based site, and I've tried putting images in as the featured image, made sure they weren't huge (under 200x200), made sure they were .jpeg... and the only thing that Facebook offers me as a thumbnail is a generic "green globe" image that I don't believe comes from my site at all.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

[TaitLarson]

This WordPress plugin might work out-of-the-box for you

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/

Just download, unzip it and put it in your wordpress plugins folder.  Once you've done that login to the wordpress admin area and locate the "plugins" menu on the left side bar.  Click on the word "Plugins".  You'll be taken to a the "Plugins" dashboard page.  Once you are there use the search box in the top right corner to find and activate your plugin.

I know you don't want to deal with PHP but if you have to here's how you'd do it.  It's pretty easy.

You'll  need to add some markup to the header (i.e. inside the "" tag) of your posts.

The old way was just to just use a "link rel" tag in your header.  I believe it still works but is deprecated.

The new way is to use Facebooks open graph tags.  See the "og:image" attribute in this document.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Here's an example of the new markup:

property="og:image" content="http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/bb2.jpg"/>

You can test out your new markup using this tool.

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2011%2F05%2F11%2Fsergey-bring-google-role%2F

[dannypenrose]

You should get arrows just underneath the thumbnail preview to be able to flick through all the images on the page you have linked too.

Hope that helps

[debi_zyx]

Thanks, Danny, but that's the only image offered (it says image 1/1 - and the arrows, "choosse thumbnail" don't work).

Any other ideas?

[debi_zyx]

Thanks, Tait.

Does the Wordpress plugin you mentioned actually add open graph tags?  Because if not, here's one that I found that does - and works quite well:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ogp/

Worth reading the plugin page on the author's website to make sure you have the installation set up right.