In our biggest release since launch, we’ve just deployed the ability to publish images.
Today, images are posted to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress. If you send an image post to other services, we’ll send just the text, without the image. We’re working on sending a link to the image to other services.
We send the image as a normal image post to both Facebook and Twitter. For WordPress, we get a bit creative. First, we upload the full original file to your WordPress site. Then, we get the image details back from WordPress, and insert the medium sized image into the post. This way, you can choose what size your Composer posted images appear in WordPress, by editing your “medium size” in your Media settings on your WordPress site.
To celebrate, I posted this picture of our office elephant to Facebook, Twitter and WordPress!
great!
Using my phone, Composer doesn’t recognize .JPG files… it seems to want .JPEG. Total bummer.
Which operating system and browser are you using? Where did the .jpg that doesn’t work come from? You downloaded it? It’s a photo you took on your phone?
I have noticed when posting something with a link, to facebook through composer, facebook doesn’t populate the thumbnail to the link.
To better explain, if you visit your facebook and in the post field paste the following message (you don’t have to actually submit the post) and wait a few seconds…
“Test test http://news.yahoo.com/meteorologist-vows-never-to-fly-again-after-seeing-latest-climate-report-134014509.html (this is just a random sample url)”
You will see the thumbnail related for that page show to the left of the text. Now, if you create a post through composer and have it sent to FB or a FB Page, you only get the text. Because of this I reverted back to manually posting FB posts since the post is much more noticeable to the eye with a thumbnail versus everyone missing my updates as they run off their screen 🙂
I don’t know if there is a tweak within FB’s API that allows for thumbnail population to links within posts, but it would make a big difference for users.
James
Great suggestion, and something we can definitely work on. The API does allow us to pass in this kind of meta data. Here’s a question. If somebody posts 2 links in a post, which one do we use for the thumbnail? Do we use the first one? The last one? Only send a thumbnail if there’s only one link? What if there’s only one link with a thumbnail available, do we choose that one? I guess we could try to copy facebook’s own behaviour, any idea exactly what that is?
When posting multiple links in facebook, it thumbnails the first url. If you type it out manually, of course it will populate the first one you finish typing and ignore the rest. However, if you pre-type it and paste the contents into the box, after a few seconds it eventually thumbnails the first link again. So the verdict is in….first link.
Personally I have mixed feelings about it. Maybe FB should focus on not thumbnailing when it comes to multiple links as all it does is show bias towards one link and the additional links may be ignored by the viewer. However, if I was forced to chose, I would agree first link would be best as if all links are related, usually the first one you type is the initial subject matter anyways.
Ok, thanks for checking the Facebook behaviour. I think you’re right. Matching Facebook’s behaviour makes sense. In the future we could add an option that allows different behaviours to be triggered for pro users maybe. Thanks for reaching out and sharing your feedback, I really appreciate it. I’ll put this feature on the roadmap.