Hi everyone,
We are currently rolling out a consistency change that should be imperceptible by most, in order to fix a few bugs, but which changes the default behavior of existing apps relating to the Page Image that’s embedded in Facebook and other services.
A few years ago, Facebook introduced per-page preview images that were embedded next to links. Bubble has had that feature for a while as part of SEO features, currently available on every paid plan.
Starting late 2020, some services (namely WhatsApp) started hiding the embedded image if the source was larger than 300kb in size.
In parallel, contrary to most other places where Bubble displays images, the Image for page link previews was not being processed by Imgix at all, making it larger than necessary and very hard to ensure that it stayed under strict size limits. Because of that, we received multiple reports of images not showing up in WhatsApp link previews, because the images being used were too large.
Therefore, we are rolling out a change that will by default process all such images through Imgix, retaining the original dimensions, but with a Imgix’s default JPG compression presets.
This should not be visibly noticeable, and should improve overall preview generation speed (when typing a link in Messenger/Whatsapp, etc) - no action is needed.
However, since this may marginally degrade original images that weren’t compressed (such as lossless JPGs) if you want to retain the original visual quality, you may either use “:processed with Imgix” modifiers to force a better quality preset (like 90-100), or opt out of the Imgix processing entirely by appending “?ignore_imgix=true” to your image URLs.
If you have been experiencing these images not showing up in your WhatsApp link previews, they should most likely now work thanks to the default compression presets, but if they still don’t, consider either resizing the images, or using “:processed with Imgix” on the image to apply a stronger compression preset (like 25-50) to make sure that the final image stays under 300px.
Best,