While redesigning my photography website, I've looked into the Open Graph (OG) images, which are displayed when sharing a link on social media or messaging apps. Here's an example from WhatsApp:
For each photo that I publish, I create a WebP thumbnail for the gallery. I wanted to use those as OG images, but the WebP support was lacking, so I've been creating an additional JPG variant just for Open Graph. I was interested in seeing how things have changed in the last 2.5 years.
I've tested the following platforms: WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, Slack, Teams, Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Bluesky, Threads and Phanpy (Mastodon). Here are the results:
- All providers support JPEG and PNG.
- All providers except Teams and Xing support WebP.
- No provider except Facebook supports AVIF. WhatsApp displays the AVIF image, but the colors are broken.
- "X, formerly Twitter" didn't display OG images for my test pages at all. I don't care about that platform, so I didn't bother to further investigate.
Those results confirmed that I could now use WebP Open Graph images without creating an additional JPG file.