Wordpress-seo: Add option to disable auto og:image tag creation

[jakebellacera]

What did you expect to happen?

I have a default og:image set on Yoast. I was expecting to have the default og:image set on my page if I have not explicitly set an og:image on my page.

What happened instead?

Images found on the page were automatically set as og:image tags.

I think this feature is OK, and I understand why it was included, but we do not want it on our pages.

How can we reproduce this behavior?

https://databricks.com/spark/about

Technical info

• WordPress version: 4.7
• Yoast SEO version: 4.0.2

[terw-dan]

Thanks for your feature request.

Is there any particular reason you want to disable this? I don't know if we can make a feature to disable this, but knowing why it would be nice to disabled would help in deciding if and how to do this.

[jakebellacera]

For us, it has to do with the fact that we want to control the way our website is presented through social media. The image that Yoast is automatically pulling was never intended to be used as an og:image and therefore does not look very enticing (to us at least):

We'd rather it use our default og:image instead, since we aren't explicitly setting an image. The image below shows a different page on our website that has no og:image set, and no images uploaded on the page, so the default image is being shown:

The quick-fix solution on our end is to manually specify the default og:image a second time on this page (and all of the other pages that are affected), but I think that this feature should be toggleable instead since it has some undesirable consequences to us.

[terw-dan]

Thanks for the explanation. We'll look into it to see if this can be integrated in our plugin.

[superpowered]

I think in general, we could stand for a bit more control of the og:image generation.

As it currently stands in the plugin, the only way to generate mutiple og:image tags is to let the plugin automatically find them. But, in my experience, it tends to grab logos, and images that weren't intended for that purpose.

But then, if you choose to put an image in via the manager on the page, your then restricted to one single image, and can no longer take advantage of Facebook's "Gallery" type preview.

There should be a way to include more than one image file per page, that's decided by the creator. I'm currently able to accomplish this through an ACF repeater field, but it would be best for it to be built in.

[jakebellacera]

@superpowered I agree. Having an image picker similar to the Media gallery would be extremely useful.

[jdevalk]

The UI for multiple images would be confusing... So, no, not a fan.

[jdevalk]

Also not willing to add UI to disable it.

[vesper8]

was dealing with the same issue.. found that the only way for me was to disable the Facebook part of Yoast completely and then use another plugin to inject specifically the tags I wanted in the header

[jakebellacera]

Update for anyone still stumbling on this thread: nearly 3 years later and I still run into this issue all the time when setting up new sites. Luckily, you can easily override this functionality with a filter. This plugin I made has worked well for me:

https://gist.github.com/jakebellacera/c2aab8f786a0617b27dd4914c70463d4

[jdevalk]

Note that we've had an image picker for these images for years already :)

[jakebellacera]

@jdevalk my original issue didn't really ask for a picker - I wanted the option to disable the automatic images it puts in if you don't set one. I wanted it to show the fallback default image you set in the Social settings in the case that I didn't set one.