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How we import images

We have several rules to help us ensure we’re using the most relevant image possible for your articles. However, sometimes our importer doesn’t pick up the images you want it to pick up, which can be frustrating.

Knowing the specific rules our importer uses will help you find the best way to guarantee that we are displaying the images you want associated with your blog.

First rule

First, the importer looks for an image in your RSS feed. If you’re not sure about the kind of information you have in your RSS feed, then talk to your webmaster to find out if you have images there already.

Second rule

If the importer does not find an image in the RSS feed, it will look for a meta image. A meta image is an image file that is designated by the open graph meta tags in the page’s HTML. We highly recommend that you set a meta image for your own purposes as well, because the meta image is what will appear as a preview when you share your articles on social media.

Setting a meta image is generally simple. You can either ask your webmaster for help setting up a system to designate a meta image, or you can look into whether your blog provider already has a solution. WordPress has an add-on that will allow you to set a meta image.

Third rule

Finally, if the importer does not find a meta image, it will look for the biggest image file on the page. An important thing to remember about this rule is that large images are often re-sized in a page’s HTML, so the smallest image on your page might actually have the largest file size. It is the image with the largest file size that our RSS feed importer looks for. A common image type that’s imported under this rule is author headshots. These are often uploaded at very large dimensions, and then sized down with HTML.

For example, between these two images:

Image file: 1,673 x 1,378 pixels
Displayed at: 200 x 165 pixels
Image file: 300 x 247 pixels
Displayed at: 300 x 247 pixels



The image on the left would be chosen by the importer, because the image file is bigger.

Workarounds

If you’re still struggling to get the image you want displayed, then Aggregage offers two additional options to help you manage your brand on our sites.

The first option is to utilize our stock images library. This will also occur if the importer does not find any image to associate with your article. We can set up your blog so that our system randomly picks one of the stock images from our library, guaranteeing a professional image is displayed alongside your posts on our site.

The second option is to have a universal image that is used for your source. You can provide us with an image that you would like to use for all of your articles that do not have an image by emailing us at editors@aggregage.com. This image will be used instead of stock images from our library.

Please note that we are not able to accommodate requests to modify images on an article-by-article basis.