Shack Open Graph Documentation

How to Exclude Shack Slides from Facebook Sharing

"Shack Slides" is a brilliant way to promote your products or services on a Joomla 3 site. But when a visitor would want to share your Joomla article on their Facebook, Facebook will use an image of one of the slides of your slideshow instead of the image of the Joomla article. 

Let's say you installed Shack Open Graph and left its default settings intact. Your Joomla site has a "Shack Slides Pro" module positioned above your Joomla articles. In this use case, Facebook will share an image taken from your slideshow.  

In this document, you will learn how to set the "Shack Open Graph" Joomla plugin to share images from your Joomla articles instead of the images of your Shack Slides Pro slideshow.  

Let's get started.

The problem

Here is a screenshot with a Joomla 3 page displaying a slideshow and underneath - a Joomla article with an image: 

page with slideshow and joomla article

When a visitor of this Joomla site would share this article on their Facebook, you would like their Facebook post to include the image from the article. But you click on Facebook's Share button and see that Facebook instead shares an image from the slideshow:

wrong image to share

Let's take a look at how to fix it. 

The solution

  • In your Joomla administrator panel, go to "Extensions" > "Plugins": 

go to extensions plugins

  • This will bring you to the "Plugins" screen. Find the "Shack Open Graph" plugin and open it up for editing. You will be taken to the "Plugins: System - Shack Open Graph" page.
  • On the "Plugin" tab, set the "Images in links" to "Yes": 

set images in links to yes

  • Click the "Advanced" tab and click "Open Facebook Debugger":

click open facebook debugger

  • This will bring you to the Facebook's "Sharing Debugger" page, as shown in the image below. Enter the URL of the page of your Joomla article into the field and click "Debug":

enter url click debug

  • You might see the "This URL hasn't been shared on Facebook before" message. If you do, click the "Fetch new information" button next to it:

click fetch new information

  • On the next screen, notice the wrong image displayed in the "Link Preview" section:

wrong image preview

  • This is the problem that you want to fix. To do that, click the "Scrape Again" button twice:

click the scrape again button

  • Check the "Link Preview" section. It should now display the image of your Joomla 3 article instead of the image of your Shack Slides slideshow:

proper image displayed