Home/ Questions/Q 6856455
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T01:53:18+00:00

I was looking at how Facebook makes external websites previews given on a URL

  • 0

I was looking at how Facebook makes external websites previews given on a URL shared by the user. The result is not just a thumbnail but actual text, an embedded video or an image depending on the link given. For example, if you post a link from a Wikipedia article, it displays text. If you post the link of a video from Dailymotion, it embeds it.
Is there a PHP/Javascript-Ajax approach to accomplish this? Any specific library for this purpose?

If there isn’t, what’s the best way server-side (in PHP if possible) solution for web scraping and displaying a thumbnail preview?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Facebook does this by looking for Open Graph meta tags. In the case of embedded videos, it’s looking for the og:video tag.

    If there aren’t OG tags, it’ll make a best guess.

    • 0