Set Facebook OG:image tag to none or blank?

Question

I have been scouring the Facebook docs and Stack Overflow to try to find a way to set the Open Graph image meta tags declaration to none or blank. I cannot find this anywhere, which is strange because I would almost be certain someone would have wanted to do this before, too.

I can find nothing.

My next guess -- to pull this off -- would be to set the OG meta image to a blank gif or png. This seems kind of hacky, but if there is no way officially to set the OG image tag to blank or none, is this the best (and only) way to do it?

Answer 1

I think you've answered your own question. There is no way to do it in the Facebook API docs. You could try setting the meta data to a blank or white image and see if it works.

I hope that helps, even tho its not much of answer.

Answer 2

After extensive research, I also tried the transparent image route, and while it does appear to get used by Facebook, there are various difficulties that made it unusable in our case.

1. I attempted both a 1x1px transparent og:image (which Facebook ignores, because it doesn't meet Facebook's minimum specs (i.e., the image must be at least 200x200px).
2. This led me to a 200x200 transparent PNG, which is used, but it presents a blank white image to the left of the article presentation (Facebook preview of a 200x200px og:image).
3. I even attempted to set the width and height (OG) tags, and set it to 1px wide and 1px tall (though the actual image was 200x200). This seemed to achieve the desired result in Facebook's Object image debugger (i.e., no image on the left, just showing article text), but this success was short-lived. When I posted this same test to my actual Facebook news feed, the width/height attributes were ignored, and the image was again a square (200x200px) white box to the left of the article presentation.
4. So we landed on using a default image (company logo), giving up hope that Facebook would allow us to force the omission of an og:image.