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When I share content from my site it posts an image to Facebook as it should. I have noticed that the image is small, roughly 100x100 at best. Yet on other people's posts of content from other sites the content is much larger. (320x320 roughly.) I do not know why the images from my site are reduced to such a small size. The images on my site are much larger than the thumbnails.

I use AddThis to share my photos. Is this playing a part or am I missing some code on my site? Any help with this is greatly appreciated and any clarification I can offer I will.

Update

I have added OG Tags as Nick recommended in an answer below, the image is still small, here is the code I used: 

<meta property="og:title" content="My Title" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="URL Path" />
<meta property="og:image" content="Image File Path" />
<meta property="og:image:type" content="image/jpeg" />
<meta property="og:image:width" content="620" />
<meta property="og:image:height" content="541" />

Any ideas how to increase the size?

It might would help to understand why Facebook shows some images at one size and others and another size.

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2 Answers 2

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You can add a meta tag in your page's <head> area with the og:image property to point to the image you want Facebook to use when people Like your page:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://yoursite.com/path/to/image.jpg"/>

If you don't use this tag, Facebook's page scraper will pick an image for you. It's very likely that Facebook is finding 100px wide images elsewhere on the page and using those instead of your larger images. (The other sites you've seen are probably specifying their 320px images using the og:image meta tag.)

How you add the meta tag depends on the publishing software you're using. If you're using WordPress, for example, the Open Graph Pro plugin allows you to pick a featured image in your post editor for Facebook to use; it then inserts the og:image meta tag pointing to that image.

Update: following your comments below, the reason some of the photos on your wall appear larger than the linked photo is that they have been reposted from one of your friend's photos that was initially uploaded to Facebook. i.e. They are not shared links to external websites.

Facebook shows your friend's photos with a large thumbnail, but external sites with a small thumbnail. There's no change you can make to your site to get it to use larger thumbnails. It's just how Facebook works at present.

If you wanted the images to appear bigger in other people's streams, you could upload them as images to your Facebook page (or to an official Facebook page for your site), and get people to like the photos you've uploaded to Facebook directly instead of liking the link to the page containing the photo on your site.

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  • Thanks for the assistance, I implemented the OG Tags, and even specified the image size. One thing to note is there is no other size of the image available at all on my entire site including the specific page. I edited my question to show the code I used.
    – L84
    Nov 7, 2011 at 19:34
  • @Lynda That's strange. Can you run your URL through Facebook's debugger and edit your question to show any errors or missing tags it flags, please?
    – Nick
    Nov 8, 2011 at 8:59
  • No Errors, Maybe if I understood why some images are larger than others I might can fix this. Here is what Facebook's Debugger had to say: tinyurl.com/7qxm4v6
    – L84
    Nov 8, 2011 at 21:07
  • @Lynda I've just tried liking the URL you're using in the linter using a Facebook test account. Your image is displaying as a thumbnail fine for me: img.skitch.com/20111109-qya8ph746i9yxnjqw8kbq1tjc3.jpg I don't remember ever seeing a thumbnail image for a shared link larger than this in Facebook. (The CSS for the image container even specifies max-width:90px.) Can you link to an example of a page elsewhere that, when 'liked', displays a large thumbnail in Facebook instead? It would be helpful to see what they're doing differently to you.
    – Nick
    Nov 9, 2011 at 12:08
  • @Lynda I've updated my answer to explain why those images are appearing larger. It's because they're photos from Facebook, not links to external websites. Facebook displays internal photos differently to external links.
    – Nick
    Nov 9, 2011 at 18:13
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you can do it

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/using-actions/#photos

by adding user_generated tag

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  • Welcome to Pro Webmasters! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – John Conde ♦
    Mar 16, 2014 at 12:47

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