Changing shared Facebook pictures

Factual Questions
1

I have a feeling this is a dumb question, and on the face of it it seems like it should work like changing a photo on a webpage. I just want to be sure.

Suppose I upload a .jpeg image with the caption ALL YOU’RE BASE ARE BELONG TO US to a photo-hosting site, and link to the image on Facebook. My friends think it’s funny and share it. Their friends share it. And so on. And then a week later I discover the grammatical error. :smack: I make a new image with ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US, and I upload it with the same name to the photo hosting site.

Would the corrected image be seen on all of those friends’ sites and friends of friends’ sites?

The obvious answer is ‘Yes. The url now links to a different image.’ But I don’t know how Facebook works. For all I know they cache the image on their site, and the image would not change.

2

Facebook isn’t caching the image on their servers, it would defeat the purpose of sharing off site links.

3

That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t sure.

4

Then why can my phone upload a picture directly to my Facebook page without ever posting it or downloading it any place else?

5

Just tested & I can use one from my desktop that is loaded no where else.

And of course links to photo servers work just fine…

6

Actually, Facebook can keep a cache of image thumbnails and basic sharing info. You can debug this by typing in the URL here:

That shows you what Facebook sees, and I believe you can force a recrawl if it’s stale. But it’ll take a while to propagate to all users, I think. It’s been a while since I’ve played with it, but I remember it did help (eventually) in spreading a changed page/image across Facebook.