CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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spaceman-spiff
spaceman-spiff

Reputation: 111

Facebook can't set Thumbnail correctly on YouTube videos with Custom Thumbnails - 404 error

Ok - I'm absolutely stumped. For some reason, Facebook has started having a very hard time with the Open Graph metadata and tags coming in from YouTube videos and then can't set the thumbnail correctly.

I've got some videos and playlists that have a custom thumbnail set and they just never show up properly in the preview when shared on Facebook.

I see this whether I try posting straight into Facebook or by using their Sharing URL Debugger tool https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

I've had this issue happen on videos as well as video playlists. For example, if I pass a URL into the debugger, YouTube keeps returning bad URL for the thumbnail image like this:

Image Unavailable
Error while downloading https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gshPq_mYTXM/maxres2.jpg with HTTP response code: 404

Visiting that URL does in fact generate a 404. If I modify the URL to https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gshPq_mYTXM/maxresdefault.jpg then it loads what is supposed to be the thumbnail for my playlist on youtube.

So why is Facebook grabbing https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gshPq_mYTXM/maxres2.jpg and how do I stop it? Or is something broken by YouTube and it only generates that URL instead of the valid https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gshPq_mYTXM/maxresdefault.jpg?

I have spent several hours trying to debug this with no success. Even creating new playlists, I still run into the problem.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1192

Answers (1)

spaceman-spiff
spaceman-spiff

Reputation: 111

This appears to have been a caching issue. After 48 hours the issues seemed to have self-resolved and youtube is no longer issuing og:image meta tag with an invalid file.

Upvotes: 0

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