title: Facebook, opengraph, how do they crop?
body: <p>I have a website, with a simple 500x500 image listed appropriately in the <code>&lt;meta property="og:image" content="image.jpg" /&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>Facebook will sometimes crop and use the top of the image, the middle or in some cases the bottom to get it's required aspect ratio out of it. Is there anything I can do to control this? Or better yet, get it to take the entire square image in like every other social networking site does?</p>
  
  <p><code>In my findings if your image is not 600x315 1200x630 or other 40:21 ratio facebook has a three step algorithm for determining what to crop as outlined below.</code></p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>FINDINGS:</p>
    
    <p>First Priortiy: Face detection. Detects center point of faces. If
    multiple faces determines the ones that are closest together and bases
    the crop on that.</p>
    
    <p>Second Priority: Some sort of contrast detection: Detail > Colors >
    Contrast. So if you had a picture of a face on the top of an image and
    the rest of the image was blurred out because the picture was taken
    with an extremely low aperture. Then, if you have a lot of colors in a
    certain part of an image it would favor that and then if there was a
    really dark image that had a bright white watermark in the bottom
    right hand corner it would favor that.</p>
    
    <p>Third Priority: This is more of a default, if the above two don't
    work, it defaults to a center crop.</p>
  </blockquote>