[Plugin: Easy Social] Facebook & Send Feature picking up random images from posts – Please help.

hmm interesting. Guess I never noticed that until you pointed it out. I went back to the site that I’m using the plugin on and tested, and here’s how it seems to be working for me:

If there’s an image in the post that I’m trying to “send”, then it uses that image when doing the send.

If there’s no image in the post being sent, it seems to pick an image from someplace else on the site, not sure why.

I looked @ the code for the module, and I can’t see anything in there that is making this happen. It kind of looks like the FB send button code is picking this up on its own.

The code that the module uses to generate the buttons is pretty simple:

function add_social_buttons($content, $url = '') {
		$social .= '<div id="easy-social-buttons">';

    if ($url) {
      $href = array (
        'fb' => ' data-href="' . $url . '"',
        'twitter' => ' data-url="' . $url . '"',
        'google' => ' href="' . $url . '"',
        'linkedin' => ' data-url="' . $url . '"',
        'stumbleupon' => ' location="' . $url . '"',
      );
    } else {
      $href = array ();
    }
		//Facebook Button
		$social .= '<div class="easy-social-button fb-easy-social"><div class="fb-like" ' .
      $href['fb'] . 'data-send="true" data-layout="button_count" data-show-faces="false"></div></div>';

As you can see, the only thing that the page is sending to FB is the href… FB takes care of creating the rest of the code based on that, so I’m not sure why they’re picking up random images from the site.

If there is an image in the content that you’re trying to share, does it pick up that image or a random one?

(the site I have this on is http://coolersa.com btw if you want to see how it works there)

Yeah it’s kind of a strange error, because I don’t see anything in the FB API docs that indicates we can specify the image that FB will use…

The available attributes for the like button (and combined like/send button which is what the plugin is using): (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/)

href - the URL to like. The XFBML version defaults to the current page.
send - specifies whether to include a Send button with the Like button. This only works with the XFBML version.
layout - there are three options.
standard - displays social text to the right of the button and friends' profile photos below. Minimum width: 225 pixels. Minimum increases by 40px if action is 'recommend' by and increases by 60px if send is 'true'. Default width: 450 pixels. Height: 35 pixels (without photos) or 80 pixels (with photos).
button_count - displays the total number of likes to the right of the button. Minimum width: 90 pixels. Default width: 90 pixels. Height: 20 pixels.
box_count - displays the total number of likes above the button. Minimum width: 55 pixels. Default width: 55 pixels. Height: 65 pixels.
show_faces - specifies whether to display profile photos below the button (standard layout only)
width - the width of the Like button.
action - the verb to display on the button. Options: 'like', 'recommend'
font - the font to display in the button. Options: 'arial', 'lucida grande', 'segoe ui', 'tahoma', 'trebuchet ms', 'verdana'
colorscheme - the color scheme for the like button. Options: 'light', 'dark'
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Like action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'ticker', 'tickerdialog' or 'other') in which the click occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.

Nothing there that looks like a way to specify that image to me…

I checked the FB API for the separate send button too in case there were some attributes there that maybe we could use, but nothing there either: (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/send/)

href - the URL to send.
font - the font to display in the button. Options: 'arial', 'lucida grande', 'segoe ui', 'tahoma', 'trebuchet ms', 'verdana'
colorscheme - the color scheme for the button. Options: 'light', 'dark'
ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Send action:
fb_ref - the ref parameter
fb_source - the story type ('message', 'group', 'email') in which the click occurred.

So from what I’m seeing it kind of looks like a FB bug with however they’re choosing images. I guess a workaround would be to put an image in the article that you want to share… kind of an annoying workaround I know but I’m not sure what else to suggest… sorry I don’t have a better solution for ya 🙂