Link a posted photo with an app page

Question

I'm designing a photo-oriented Facebook app that would let users tell stories in the app-specific way and advertise such stories by posting a single, preferably large, "cover" photo. Photo posting is done by the app and people that would like to see the story need an easy and obvious way of being redirected to the corresponding app-generated page. So hence is the question.

Is it possible for a Facebook app to post a maximally large (column-wide) photo on the user's behalf, so that when others (non-users included) click on the photo, it takes them to a specific page that is related to the app instead of zooming into the photo by default? If not, what would be the best workaround?

Answer 1

To get the maximum large photo on news feed, you should look into user generated photos, which requires two additional parameters you add to your open graph action to indicate that the user-generated photo should have maximum photo display on news feed and ticker.

Example OG POST:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/nyccookbook:cook?

recipe=http://www.yourdomain.com/pizza.html&

image[0][url]=http://www.yourdomain.com/images/my_camera_pizza_pic.jpg&

image[0][user_generated]=true&

access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN

If the photo is not user-generated, then explicit sharing is an alternative to get maximum display size on news feed and ticker provided that you follow all the requirements and guidelines for explicit sharing.

when others (non-users included) click on the photo, it takes them to a specific page that is related to the app instead of zooming into the photo by default

This is not possible because FB users expect the behavior to zoom the photo in when clicking on it. If clicking on a photo launches an URL, it is a bad user experience because that is not what anyone expects when clicking on a photo on FB.

The best workaround I can think of is to edit the description of the image with a link to your specific page on your app, such that when a FB user sees the picture, they can click the link in the description to go where you want.