Please help us make sense of the logic and/or how to override this if possible [Solved below in replies]
Whenever we share links to pages (not sure about posts yet) that have no header image published, Ghost adds a seemingly random image to the link preview
We are trying to make a custom default image now, for all our blank spots…
but shouldn’t this be appearing somewhere in the Ghost editor to enable/disable or upload our OWN default/random images or something like that rather than having it chosen for us? If it is, I am simply missing it and would benefit from a hint as to where to look please.
I did find this bug report from 2022 with no response, which is similar but not same
As an example I sent one of my new pages to a team member for review, and it’s got this kimono image in the preview… Everyone is jumping like who put this on the site? where did this come from? and we are sure it’s not ours.
We found the source of the image is a folder we do not have access to
I know it’s not good form not to share links, but we are not putting this site out for public consumption yet so I hope the screenshot helps.
Thanks for helping me understand the function and any options to change.
One person got back just now and said it is a gallery image and not currently in use so now as a more refined Q how as an administrator do I prevent this randomization without having to upload a default image on every new page and post? Thank you
When a webpage gets shared, the client* getting the page looks at the page code to figure out what to show you as a preview. (The ‘client’ might be Facebook, or LinkedIn, or an email client, or iMessage, or some other phone app, or anywhere you might be sharing your link to, that doesn’t want to show it as a plain url…)
Ghost (like most websites) offers several choices that the client displaying a shared link might pick. There’s og:image, meant mostly for facebook, twitter:image (you guessed it), and often a logo and/or image, set within the ld+json schema. You can see all of that if you look at the page source (ctrl-U in your browser). If none of these things are set, a client may instead try to grab another image from the page.
Ghost attempts to offer an image for all those image fields (mostly). If you’ve set images in the metadata and facebook & twitter sections (right side menu in the post editor, down below where you’d set the tags & authors), it’ll use those. If you haven’t, it’ll use the featured image. If you haven’t set a featured image, it’ll use the site-wide metadata if you’ve set it, or the site cover image, as a final fallback.
So, if you’re getting the wrong image, there are two possibilities:
- Ghost is offering an image you didn’t intend. (Maybe you set the site metadata years ago and forgot it.) You can fix this by removing that image, and making sure that the post has a featured image and/or metadata images set.
- The client is either ignoring what Ghost is offering and picking another image from somewhere on the page, or Ghost has no images available (metadata not set, no cover image, post has no featured image, etc) and so the client is picking some image from the page.
One more wrinkle: Metadata for sharing tends to be cached, so if you’ve made recent changes, they may not be reflected.
If you’re trying to debug what you’re getting in shares, I recommend this tool from facebook:
You are the best thank you for taking the time with this answer 
I’m sure we can sort it from here and I’ll come back when I’m not on mobile to see if I can mark solved
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Aha – we found where the images were uploaded long ago and forgotten
There are settings for X and Facebook that were not where I had initially looked and some forgotten uploaded images were in there which I deleted
And now the link shows the front page banner as expected
Cheers
