Do you have Facebook thumbnail issues from WordPress?

If you host your own WordPress blog this might be a solution for you, or at least a workaround.

I’ve been having problems sharing my posts on Facebook since I upgraded to WordPress 2.9. At the beginning it wasn’t that bad, it would sometimes work, some other time it would only display the RSS button, but it had something.

Somewhere along the way, and after I had to reinstall WP, Facebook simply stopped showing the thumbnail.

The problem, from what I gather, is that Facebook aparently is too stupid to find the image tags in your posts, even if you have a ton of images in them. So, a solution would be to have a meta tag so Facebook and other websites, like Digg, will find them and use that as the thumbnail.

That’s where this plugin comes in.  Behold: Add Image Src WordPress Plugin.

According to the plugin’s website,

This plugin adds a meta tag to any blog posts & pages that have a featured image.

It helps ensure social sites such as FaceBook use a relevant image when sharing your content, particularly if you have a share button on your posts – this plugin ensures a relevant thumbnail is displayed next to the title and description.

For this to work you’ll have to be using a theme with Post Thumbnail Image support, so if you set a post thumbnail / featured image an image_src mata tag will be added which will signify to social sites that this is the image to use as a thumbnail.

The usage is simple, after installing and activating all you have to do is set a post thumbnail/featured image, so the plugin can automatically add the meta tag. In other words, all you have to do is make sure you have a featured image on your post, it doesn’t matter if the body of your post contains no images, or if you posted a video, as long as you set a post thumbnail/featured image it will work.

Of course I only have one blog with a theme that uses images in the previews, but so far it’s worked pretty well.

You can get the plugin from the WordPress repository and the author’s website.

If you want to see it in action try to share this post on Facebook, it should only show the featured image and not the picture I posted at the top.