For many Facebook page owners, if Facebook didn’t use the correct image they wanted for a post on a Page, even if one was correctly tagged for use on Facebook, it was a simple solution to simply upload the correct photo to go along with the link being shared.  But Facebook appears to have disabled that ability as of this morning. [Update: Since I originally posted this and the accompanying dev link, Facebook has confirmed it is a widespread issue they are in the process of correcting]

Now, as soon as you include a link to a post, it disables the ability to upload a photo.

When they preview the article or page link now, they are no longer including the photo that goes with the link, even when one is specified, such as when using one of the social tools in WordPress that allows you to select a photo to use specifically on Facebook.

Normally, this would include a preview of the image, and with the ability to scroll through available images or upload your own.  Now this is disabled.

If you try and go backwards by uploading an image then adding the link, it won’t show the excerpt from the page you link to.

Now that it is posted, you can see it automatically selected the thumbnail image from the page.  And going into edit does not give a new option to change or add a photo.

It seems this change was made to reduce the overall footprint of a link showing in the news feed for users, when Facebook does decide to show it.  You can compare it to the size of the footprint when there is a larger size image.

As you can see, it is about double the size in height when compared to the thumbnail version.

I tried this on multiple Facebook pages and the ability to include your own image along with a link was disabled on all of them.

Last week Facebook once again reduced the exposure that Facebook Page’s posts were getting, so this change could be part of that, although Facebook always seems to be making changes to reduce how often a Page’s post is actually seen by users.

And if you like what you see on our Facebook page, you can Like it here 🙂

Update: If you do not have a featured image set, it will use a larger image, but display it as a thumbnail.  After posting it sometimes appears as full image versus a thumbnail version of it.

Update 2: It seems as though some people are seeing it and others aren’t, so it is likely either a test or still rolling out.  Some people started seeing it yesterday.

Update 3: There is a bug report filed for this, many people are reporting problems and it sounds as though it will be fixed for those that are affected.  Thank you Vincent for commenting on the report.