I have another answer to your Question.
Reference: https://sparkengine.call2action.com/sparks/5186/live
The above webpage you want to share doesn't have the Facebook Opengraph protocol for the webpage's thumbnail to be used when sharing links with Facebook.
Here's what that metatag should look like:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://sparkengine.call2action.com/assets/c2a_logo_white-6396a6a536d065359780af683e66dd2a.png"/>
Read more about using this propery name HERE.
In Facebook's debugger tool, it could just be showing a thumbnail that's rendered in the debugger but not necessarily associated with the shared link process.
Although you do see a thumbnail image in the Network Tab, it's not necessarily the case that this will be used in the shared link process, hence the Facebook Opengraph protocol solves this problem, and allows further customization.
EDIT:
It appears at the moment of this writing, your webpage's template has changed. I now notice that the only previously seen og metatag names of:
og:video
og:video:height
og:video:width
now includes the og:image
metatag, along with other newly added og
metatag properties.
Current image file provided for og:image
metatag:
https://c2a-v3.s3.amazonaws.com/sparks/spark_5186/media/thumbnails/spark_5186_09_28_2012_WgZN50Q.jpg
In Firefox web browser, but not in IE8, accessing the og:image directly in the browsers address bar produced this download box:
What also struck me odd about that download is that it's identified as a flash movie. To be sure, no issues were seen in IE8.
I then tested that image thumbnail link directly in Chromes web browser, and that caused an automatic download of that image, but it did not display in the browser, treating it like a downloaded mime type file.
This was true for both thumbnails in both your examples. Perhaps the server-side flash-to-thumbnail is saving the images with incorrect mime file-type information. Once downloaded and analyzed in IfranView, no errors were reported with the .jpg image
, as IrfanView will check the file header to ensure it matches it's file-type extension automatically. I would look into how these thumbnails are created on the back-end.
DIGGING DEEPER:
I now understand that you'll have no control on how these thumbnails are made, since it's a service/process done by Amazon s3 Web Servers.
Digging deeper, I see that the main domain for this image files URL is for an XML File
:
Reference: https://c2a-v3.s3.amazonaws.com
Google to the rescue. I typed in amazon thumbnail opens as file and this article mentioned to drop the protocol http://www.
or https://www.
when using a URL for og
metatags.
The Facebook Debugger shows no errors when dropping the https://
too, even though it will be report as http://
protocol.
Try:
<meta content='sparkengine.call2action.com/sparks/5186/live' property='og:url'>
<meta content='c2a-v3.s3.amazonaws.com/sparks%2Fspark_5186%2Fmedia%2Fthumbnails%2Fspark_5186_09_28_2012_WgZN50Q.jpg' property='og:image'>
Note any Facebook user can force HTTPS requests via there settings, otherwise HTTP is assumed here.
Resulting Shared Link Generated:
http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsparkengine.call2action.com%2Fsparks%2F5186%2Flive