Howdy!
Sorry for my belated reply — Gutenberg’s update seized priority.
Here’s the actual order for the singular posts/pages. The homepage is a little different, for it looks at the Homepage Settings first.
When multiple images are requested, more than one of these images may be outputted (still in this order):
- Custom image set in the SEO meta box.
- Post’s featured image.
- Images from the content.
If an image is found above, none of the following get fetched. Otherwise, the first detected of these fallbacks is captured for processing:
- Fallback image from SEO settings.
- Theme Custom Header image (Customizer option).
- Theme Custom Logo image (Customizer option).
- Site icon.
The processing of the fallback images is crude: It stops at the first image found in any of the above, which might get discarded later; thence, no Open Graph or Twitter image is outputted.
Fallback images are ignored for Structured Data, such as with Articles.
After fetching the images, they are validated for use: They must meet minimum/maximum dimension requirements (if too large: find smaller if possible) and be of a non-invalid extension type.
To clear the confusion around TSF picking up the “second content-image”: The first image might’ve been displayed in an HTML tag that isn’t supported.
Wow. Thanks for taking the time to explain this so clearly.
Based on your comments about fallback images, would you recommend always setting a specific post image (either by featured image or SEO meta box)?
Thanks again. Splendid plugin.
Hello!
Social-sharing-images do not affect ranking.
So, I recommend doing what you think is best for the viewer of a link shared to your page. You’ll know what’s right from wrong, what’s easy from expedience, and what’s efficient from expensive.
I can’t bother because I do not have the time to create beautiful images. It is a pain point I’ll resolve someday — by devoting that time I don’t have into coding a generator 🙂
Understood. Thanks again for all of your help.
