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Occasionally, I like to tweet my photos. I'm happy with the exposure I get from that, especially since the NAS Staff is always good about retweeting (really appreciate that).

What I've noticed, though, is that when I include a little thumbnail of the linked photo, I get more traffic. Occasionally, I've noticed tweeted photos in my news feed from the "other" sites and the thumbnail is automatically generated. I have to create the thumbnail myself.

Is there a way for this site to do that as well? It's a low priority thing, obviously, but it would be a nice touch. Or maybe this is already possible and I'm just doing it wrong?

We'd have to look into that.

On Facebook, it depends on whether Fb has "scraped" the URL yet. If not, you can scrape it yourself via this link:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Paste the URL you want to share into the box on that page and click "debug". If you see a message telling you "this URL hasn't been shared on Facebook before", click "Fetch new information".

On the following page, you will likely still not see a preview thumbnail. To make sure Facebook got the right image, wait a few seconds and then click "Scrape again". The preview should then appear. If you then share the link on Facebook, a preview image will be included.

But that's Facebook. I did a quick check for Twitter, but didn't find any such tool immediately. Will have to look into it in more detail.

Cool, thanks!

If you're talking about generating an image on twitter that corresponds to promoted posts, the actual process is very simple and we could easily do it for every image we promote.

However, this causes an issue with the way we protect our photographers' image rights in that twitter generates the image by creating a twitter/twimg url and presenting the image from that url, not ours. Without asking each photographer for permission to essentially export their image to twitter each time, this is a no-go for us.

Facebook is fine because they scrape information from the url we provide and present the image they find without generating a separate 'in-house' link of their own. Why twitter don't do this is a mystery. If you're happy to add a thumbnail to your tweets of any shots on here, that's fine - a few others do the same, but we can't essentially hand over an image to twitter for their use without specific permission from the respective photographer.

That's disappointing.

I seem to recall that uploading an image to Twitter puts it onto their ToS as well, giving them rights over the image. Ditto Instagram.

mhodgson wrote:I seem to recall that uploading an image to Twitter puts it onto their ToS as well, giving them rights over the image. Ditto Instagram.

It's part of the same process I mentioned. Often you'll see news sources credit "© twitter" for images, when they're obviously images lifted from a person or organisation's twitter feed. Twitter can do that because of a line of text in their ToS and that's what we want to avoid.

Well, at least making thumbnails isn't terribly time consuming. I was just hoping for a cleaner solution.

Good news! (no, it's not the Dacia Sandero).

Twitter have altered the way they present images to a facebook-esque set up where they now present a thumbnail and text box based on the URL provided. The thumbs aren't the best but they definitely liven up our feed and appear thus:



I'm going to have a play around in the morning and see if I can select one image from a URL with multiple facets and get a thumbnail to generate (particularly useful for the Daily). If I can get it to work I'll post how I did it as that would also be useful for any photographers that wish to present a preview of a body of work on twitter.

If you need coding support to help that (e.g., meta headers or whatever) let me know. I'll see what I can do.

This development is either a very definition of coincidence or Twitter is monitoring us. ::tin foil hat::

I just had a look at Twitter:




I'm assuming that Twitter is following the Facebook method of feature roll out, i.e. the new "features" aren't available to everyone at the same time.

ShyFlyer wrote:I'm assuming that Twitter is following the Facebook method of feature roll out, i.e. the new "features" aren't available to everyone at the same time.

I believe you're correct. I can see the new features on PC, it doesn't appear on apple and only seems to show on certain android devices (I suspect anything running Nougat should see it).

I'm yet to see it on things I post, but tweets from many media outlets do show with images and links.

I looked at the NAS feed and I see not the thumbnails on my laptop running Win10 & Chrome, even after a Crtl+F5

Interestingly I just shared an image (which I then immediately removed as JLAmber shared it first!) on Twitter. In IE, the link creates an image thumbnail, but doesn't in Chrome.

Just had it work on Chrome - photo tweeted by NAS shows a thumbnail

Only downside being it comes up as a square so chops a lot of the image off - but works as a nice teaser!

mhodgson wrote:Just had it work on Chrome - photo tweeted by NAS shows a thumbnail

Only downside being it comes up as a square so chops a lot of the image off - but works as a nice teaser!

They're not ideal but definitely an improvement on the previous text-only links. I'm sure further updates will address the image cropping/positioning issue.

Apologies for neglecting this. I did ask the question on twitter support some time ago but hadn't read the responses due to being very busy. By all accounts this is a staged roll-out that is anticipated to be fully functional by September 2017. Twitter actually run several versions that share the same skin but are very different under the hood, so your location and operating system will dictate when you see the latest features.

Looks like my tweets are now auto-thumbnail enabled.