Facebook Open Graph not clearing cache

Question

1. Go to http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
2. Enter the URL following by fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING

Examples:

1. http://www.example.com?fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
2. http://www.example.com?postid=1234&fbrefresh=CAN_BE_ANYTHING
3. OR visit: http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http://www.example.com/?p=3568&fbrefresh=89127348912

I was having the same issue last night, and I got this solution from some website.

Facebook saves your cache thumbnail. It won't refresh even if you delete the thumnail/image from your server. But Facebook allows you to refresh by using fbrefresh

I hope this helps.

The most voted question is quite outdated:

These are the only 2 options that should be used as of November 2014:

For non developers

1. Use the FB Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object
2. Paste the url you want to recache. (Make sure you use the same url included on your og:url tag)
3. Click the Fetch Scrape information again Button

For Developers

1. Make a GET call programmatically to this URL: https://graph.facebook.com/?id=[YOUR_URL_HERE]&scrape=true (see: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games_payments/takingpayments#scraping)
2. Make sure the og:url tag included on the head on that page matches with the one you are passing.
3. you can even parse the json response to get the number of shares of that URL.

Additional Info About Updating Images

• If the og:image URL remains the same but the image has actually changed it won't be updated nor recached by Facebook scrapers even doing the above. (even passing a ?last_update=[TIMESTAMP] at the end of the image url didn't work for me).
• The only effective workaround for me has been to assign a new name to the image.

Note regarding image or video updates on previously posted posts:

• When you call the debugger to scrap changes on your og:tags of your page, all previous Facebook shares of that URL will still show the old image/video. There is no way to update all previous posts and it's this way by design for security reasons. Otherwise, someone would be able to pretend that a user shared something that he/she actually didn't.

If you have many pages and don't want to refresh them manually - you can do it automatically.

Lets say you have user profile page with photo:

$url = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/'.$user_profile;
$user_photo = 'http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].'/'.$user_photo;

<meta property="og:url" content="<?php echo $url; ?>"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="<?php echo $user_photo; ?>"

Just add this to your page:

// with jQuery
$.post(
    'https://graph.facebook.com',
    {
        id: '<?php echo $url; ?>',
        scrape: true
    },
    function(response){
        console.log(response);
    }
);

// with "vanilla" javascript
var fbxhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
fbxhr.open("POST", "https://graph.facebook.com", true);
fbxhr.setRequestHeader("Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded");
fbxhr.send("id=<?php echo $url; ?>&scrape=true");

This will refresh Facebook cache. If you use the jQuery solution, have a look at "response" in console.log - you will find there "updated_time" field and other useful information.

The OG thumbnail does not seem to refresh even if passing the fbrefresh variable. To update this without waiting for automated clearing you'll need to change the filename of the thumbnail associated meta tag value and refresh.

I had the same issues using og:image, several attempts to rename the file or clear FB cache did not work either via the facebook debugger or testing via an actual account.

The new facebook guidelines state the image size should be 1200 x 630 or having that aspect ratio, this seems to be wrong, the only thing that worked for me was using an image with square dimensions.

Edit* Afew hours I went back to use 1200 x 630 and it magically worked, it was magical.

I also renamed the files to f*^*kfacebook.jpg, not sure it helped but it felt good.