What Open Graph is and why previews depend on it

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The preview is built from what the destination page publishes about itself, and that decides what you can change.

What Open Graph is

A set of tags a page puts in its own source to say how it should look when shared: a title, a description, an image. Facebook created it, and it became the way every platform builds link previews.

Most sites already have it. If yours runs on a common content system, it is almost certainly there without anyone having set it up.

What that means here

The app reads those tags and builds the preview from them. It does not visit the page and decide what looks good; it takes what the page offers.

So the answer to "can I use a different image" is no, and the reason is that there is nothing else to use.

Where it works well

Video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, app stores, streaming services, and screenshot tools all publish good Open Graph data. Links to those produce previews that look like the ones people are used to.

It is a picture, not a player

A video link gives you the thumbnail and a link, not something that plays inside the reply. Email cannot do that, and neither can most of the channels a reply travels through.

Clicking takes the customer straight to the video, which is as close as this gets.

If the preview looks wrong

Look at the page, not the app. A missing image or an old title means the page publishes that, and fixing it on the page fixes it everywhere the link is shared.

See also

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