Facebook/Smugmug busted

jfriend

I can't believe this is STILL busted more than a year after it was heavily discussed. I take a link to one of my own public galleries that has 60+ photos in it. I paste that link into my own Facebook posting and FB gives me one image to choose from - that's all. I can't believe Smugmug still hasn't figured out how to interface with Facebook such that FB can see images in our galleries and offer a choice of thumbnails. How hard can this be?

The gallery is public, has no restrictions on it whatsoever (external linking allowed, originals allowed, Hellow World and Hellow Smuggers allowed, etc...).

So, what gives? How am I supposed to share on FB? Is SM telling me that it just doesn't want me to host images that I share on FB? that it just wants me to upload to FB rather than SM? That's what I'm beginning to think.

FYI, I will not use Smugmug's own Facebook interface because I don't want to grant SM's app access to my FB account and because Smugmug's interface doesn't give me enough control over how the FB posting looks. I just want to paste a link into FB's own interface and have it offer me a choice of thumbnail images (like most other links on the web do). But, this is busted with Smugmug!

jfriend

Here's an update. If you copy the gallery link from the browser, Facebook does not work.

This one copied from the browser URL bar does not work:

http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Family/Half-Dome-Trip-2011/18568769_NsCfML#1434085002_DfB574s

If you go to Get A Link and get a "gallery" link from there, Facebook does work and offer you a full selection of thumbnails.

This one from Get A Link works:

http://jfriend.smugmug.com/Family/Half-Dome-Trip-2011/18568769_NsCfML.

This stuff should "just work". It shouldn't take an hour of fiddling to figure out how to do something as basic as post a link to FB.

Edit: now they both seem to work. All I know is that this did not work for more than an hour. I happen to be sick and tired of computer &^%$# that doesn't work and requires hours of fiddling. Smugmug/Facebook is not on my happy list today. Somebody's service was having troubles today.

Edit2: Is there some minimum time after gallery upload that SM needs to index things before putting a FB link in a post will work and offer all thumbs? My upload finished and I was trying to post to FB about 15 mins after the upload finished. Then, 1-1/2 hrs later it worked. Just wondering.

stlracing

Facebook has always given me the entire gallery thumbnails to choose from when giving a link. I wish when I put the url for a photo as a link on Facebook that it would just give me the thumbnail for the photo url I'm intending to link.

Andy

stlracing wrote: »

Facebook has always given me the entire gallery thumbnails to choose from when giving a link. I wish when I put the url for a photo as a link on Facebook that it would just give me the thumbnail for the photo url I'm intending to link.

I wish we could do that but we don't have that option with FB.

SamirD

jfriend wrote: »

I happen to be sick and tired of computer &^%$# that doesn't work and requires hours of fiddling.

Edit2: Is there some minimum time after gallery upload that SM needs to index things before putting a FB link in a post will work and offer all thumbs? My upload finished and I was trying to post to FB about 15 mins after the upload finished. Then, 1-1/2 hrs later it worked. Just wondering.

I hear your frustrations. I've been there.

As far as the minimum time, I read somewhere for something else that you had to run the SM through fb's linter before something worked. Maybe that's also the case with pasting links?

Andy

SamirD wrote: »

As far as the minimum time, I read somewhere for something else that you had to run the SM through fb's linter before something worked. Maybe that's also the case with pasting links?

No, this isn't true for normal usage. Only if you want to clear FB's cache - like if you replaced a photo on SmugMug.

SamirD

Andy wrote: »

No, this isn't true for normal usage. Only if you want to clear FB's cache - like if you replaced a photo on SmugMug.

Thank you for the clarification Andy. Do you think running a SM url through the linter would assist in jfriend's issue?

caffeinatederic

I'm running into this as well today. If I share using the Be Social dropdown, I get a thumbnail in the link. If I copy the gallery link via Get A Link, the only thumbnails it offers are for blank spacer images. Example gallery link that doesn't show tumbnails in FB:

http://www.ericschaffner.net/Nature/2011-08-20-Spiders-Stratagem/18629287_CPVPzM

Andy

caffeinatederic wrote: »

I'm running into this as well today. If I share using the Be Social dropdown, I get a thumbnail in the link. If I copy the gallery link via Get A Link, the only thumbnails it offers are for blank spacer images. Example gallery link that doesn't show tumbnails in FB:

http://www.ericschaffner.net/Nature/2011-08-20-Spiders-Stratagem/18629287_CPVPzM

Hi please write our heroes and we'll help http://help.smugmug.com

SteveM

John/Samir,

The way I had it explained to me is, Facebook doesn't actually link to, or reference the gallery itself. FB crawls available SmugMug sites, then caches the findings. This is what you're given to choose from in regards to thumbnails, and there can be a delay. I don't know how much I'm losing in the translation or dynamic of how this works, but that's the gist of it. This is Facebook's mechanism, though, the way I understand it.

jfriend

SteveM wrote: »

John/Samir,

The way I had it explained to me is, Facebook doesn't actually link to, or reference the gallery itself. FB crawls available SmugMug sites, then caches the findings. This is what you're given to choose from in regards to thumbnails, and there can be a delay. I don't know how much I'm losing in the translation or dynamic of how this works, but that's the gist of it. This is Facebook's mechanism, though, the way I understand it.

I don't think that's how it works. FB can't possibly "know" about every page on the web in advance of you pasting a link. Perhaps Google could come close, but that isn't the business that FB is in.

I think it works like this: You give FB the URL in your post and it then goes and immediately, in real-time, crawls the page at that moment to see what is there. It fetches things like title, description and images. It then caches that result for some period of time (so it doesn't have to recrawl it right away if it's referenced again). Smugmug tries to detect that it is FB crawling their site and tries to serve up a FB-friendly page (no ajax, more real images) so that FB can offer a selection of actual image thumbnails.

Unfortunately, something is broken on SM or FB and sometimes this process doesn't work right with FB. In my case, I was offered only one thumbnail which wasn't what I wanted to display at all.

SamirD

SteveM wrote: »

John/Samir,

The way I had it explained to me is, Facebook doesn't actually link to, or reference the gallery itself. FB crawls available SmugMug sites, then caches the findings. This is what you're given to choose from in regards to thumbnails, and there can be a delay. I don't know how much I'm losing in the translation or dynamic of how this works, but that's the gist of it. This is Facebook's mechanism, though, the way I understand it.

jfriend wrote: »

I don't think that's how it works. FB can't possibly "know" about every page on the web in advance of you pasting a link. Perhaps Google could come close, but that isn't the business that FB is in.

I think it works like this: You give FB the URL in your post and it then goes and immediately, in real-time, crawls the page at that moment to see what is there. It fetches things like title, description and images. It then caches that result for some period of time (so it doesn't have to recrawl it right away if it's referenced again). Smugmug tries to detect that it is FB crawling their site and tries to serve up a FB-friendly page (no ajax, more real images) so that FB can offer a selection of actual image thumbnails.

Unfortunately, something is broken on SM or FB and sometimes this process doesn't work right with FB. In my case, I was offered only one thumbnail which wasn't what I wanted to display at all.

This makes more sense to me, and is the reason why I was thinking running a url through the linter might help.

When I added an og:image meta to my vublletin based site, I didn't see any links update the fb activity feed until I manually ran through the linter a few times. I'm sure they refresh their cache automatically on a regular basis, but I think the linter helps to manually expedite this process.