snarfed
publish: stop attaching u-featured images?
Hi folks!
I mark up my featured images for blog posts with ~~u-photo~~ edit: u-featured, but they are also the social share images for my posts. When Bridgy publishes them, it publishes both the image and the URL, but platforms like Mastodon then don't show the share card image, which means when someone clicks on the image they just get a pop up of the image, rather than taken to the full blog post like they would with the share card.
I don't ideally want to take u-featured off, because it seems like the wrong answer to the problem - the markup is right, I just want Bridgy to ignore it in this case 😆 Would it be possible to have an omit-link equivalent for this kind of situation - perhaps omit-image - or, even in the more generic case, adding a p-bridgy-ignore-element class that just makes Bridgy act as though one specific item on the page wasn't there?
Thank you!
Hi! Hmm, interesting use case. Out of curiosity, I'm not aware of any link preview generators that use u-photo specifically. Are you?
Also, are you maybe looking for u-featured instead?
Re the specific request, it's possible, but I'm not sure. I wonder if I'd maybe just make e-bridgy-mastodon-content ignore u-photo instead.
Thanks for the reply!
No, I'm not aware of any link generators using Microformats. It feels like the right thing to do with markup that's meant to be generic is to mark up the whole lot, though, rather than leaving a featured image that's marked up otherwise out of the Microformats version just to avoid Bridgy picking it up, if that makes sense!
Re u-featured - I think I chose not to use that simply because it was shown on the Microformats wiki to be a proposed addition rather than the slightly stronger wording of u-photo being a draft property. I agree though that it's probably semantically better, and looking again at the distinction drawn there between draft and proposed addition, I think I should probably switch over to that!
Removing the photo when Mastodon content is supplied would fix this issue for me on Mastodon, but maybe worth thinking about how it interfaces with other networks that post summaries rather than the full content?
Glad u-featured sounds ok! Assuming this is for blog posts like eg https://cpf.sh/blog/2025/07/06/we-are-all-creatives-genai-threatens-us-all , u-featured is definitely what you want, not u-photo. From https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry#u-photo (emphasis mine):
u-photo - one or more photos that is/are considered the primary content of the entry, unless there is a p-location h-card, which is still considered a "checkin" (i.e. with a photo). Otherwise the presence of a u-photo means the name of the entry should be interpreted as a caption on the photo, and the summary/content should be interpreted as a description of the photo.
...ie, u-photo is for Instagram style photo posts, eg https://snarfed.org/2025-05-18_54956 , not for article style blog posts.
Done! I gather that has the same behaviour according to the Bridgy docs, though? https://brid.gy/about#picture
Interesting! I wonder if maybe the prominence of Open Graph today has superseded the (perfectly sensible!) idea there?
Yup, very much so. Built in rich link previews are much more widespread and expected now than 8y ago.