Instagram Link Preview Checker

Q: Is Peekly free?

Yes. Checking a single URL is free forever — no signup and no limit on one-off checks. Batch watching and monitoring may arrive later as a paid Pro plan; the free single-URL tool stays.

Q: Why does my link show no image when I share it?

Usually one of four things: there's no og:image tag, the image URL is relative instead of absolute, the image is behind a login, firewall or bot block, or the file is too big or in an unsupported format like SVG. Peekly checks all four and tells you which one it is.

Q: What size should my og:image be?

1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) as a PNG or JPG under about 300 KB. That size works for large cards on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack and WhatsApp.

Q: Do I need twitter: tags if I already have Open Graph tags?

X reads og:title, og:description and og:image as fallbacks, but you still need twitter:card set to summary_large_image if you want the big image card. Without it, X shows a small thumbnail.

Q: I fixed my tags but the old preview still shows. Why?

Platforms cache link previews, sometimes for days. Facebook and LinkedIn let you force a refresh with their own debugging tools. On X, Slack and Discord the cache usually expires on its own, or you can add a query string such as ?v=2 to the URL.

Q: Do you store the pages I check?

No. We fetch the page once to read its , show you the result, and don't save the page or the result. We only fetch public http(s) URLs, and private or internal addresses are blocked.

Meta fetches a link shared on Instagram with FacebookExternalHit and stores a title, a description, and a thumbnail. Paste a URL to check those Open Graph tags. The cards below are the other platforms that read the same tags — Peekly does not draw an Instagram story, profile, or DM.

How Instagram gets the preview

The crawler Meta documents. Meta's web-crawler page, updated May 21, 2026, says FacebookExternalHit crawls an app or website shared on Meta's family of apps, and it names Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The link may have been copied and pasted, or shared with the Facebook social plugin. The crawler gathers, caches, and displays a title, a description, and a thumbnail. The user-agent strings on that page are facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) and facebookexternalhit/1.1. meta-externalagent, meta-webindexer, and meta-externalads are listed as different crawlers, for AI indexing and ads. A robots.txt block on those names is not a block on the share crawler. FacebookExternalHit may bypass robots.txt when it is checking for malware. The same page says the server must support gzip and deflate, the Open Graph properties have to appear in the first 1 MB or they are cut off, and the response has to come back within a few seconds. The crawler sends a Range header. Their own example is bytes=0-524288. The site should return the tags inside that range, or ignore Range and return the whole head. There is no second Instagram crawler on the page.
Tags and the image. Meta does not publish an Instagram tag list or an Instagram pixel size. The fields that crawler stores are a title, a description, and a thumbnail, which are og:title, og:description, and og:image. og:url should be the canonical URL of the page. Add og:image:width and og:image:height so the image can render on the first share, before the file has been measured. The image rules Facebook publishes for this same crawl — at least 200×200, 1200×630 for the large card, under 8 MB, JPEG, GIF, or PNG — are on the Facebook Link Preview Checker page. Use that size. A path with no host, an http:// image, or a file behind a login leaves the thumbnail empty. Nothing on the crawler page says the fetch runs JavaScript. Put the tags in the HTML the server sends. A profile link page is a different surface: Meta's help for that page says you type the URL and a title, and an eligible account can add an image. That title is the one you entered. It is not documented as a read of og:title.
```
<meta property="og:title" content="Page title">
<meta property="og:description" content="One or two sentences.">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://example.com/og.png">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="1200">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="630">
<meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/page">
```
An instagram.com URL. The tags above are for a page you publish. An Instagram post URL is a page Instagram publishes, and Instagram does not document its Open Graph markup. A request for a public /p/ URL can come back as the logged-out app shell: the document title is Instagram, and the head contains no og: tags. That is the HTML returned to facebookexternalhit, Twitterbot, Googlebot, and Slackbot for a public post. A platform that only receives that shell has no caption and no image to show. Paste the post URL here if you need to see which response this fetch got. The URL you can fix is the page you link out to.
Refresh it. Meta's crawler page says a failed or empty crawl can be repeated in the Sharing Debugger, or with the Sharing API. That is the same debugger the Facebook guide describes, at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug. You need to be logged in. Scraping again updates what Meta has stored for that URL, which is the cache FacebookExternalHit uses when the link is shared on Instagram. This checker shows the tags your server sends. It does not send Meta's Range header, and it does not clear that cache. A query string such as ?v=2 is a different URL. A story or message that already has a card keeps the one it stored.

Tags covered: og:title · og:description · og:image · og:url · og:image:width · og:image:height

More checkers

What each platform reads

X / Twittertwitter:card, twitter:* → og:* fallback1200×630 (min 300×157), < 5 MB
Facebookog:title, og:description, og:image1200×630, 1.91:1
LinkedInog:title, og:image (og: only)1200×627, 1.91:1
Discordog:site_name, og:*, theme-color, twitter:cardLarge image needs summary_large_image
Slackog:site_name, og:title, og:description, og:image1200×630
WhatsAppog:title, og:description, og:imageKeep < 300 KB

Guidance based on each platform's public documentation and observed behavior. Platforms change their rules without notice.

FAQ

+Is Peekly free?

Yes. Checking a single URL is free forever — no signup and no limit on one-off checks. Batch watching and monitoring may arrive later as a paid Pro plan; the free single-URL tool stays.

+Why does my link show no image when I share it?

Usually one of four things: there's no og:image tag, the image URL is relative instead of absolute, the image is behind a login, firewall or bot block, or the file is too big or in an unsupported format like SVG. Peekly checks all four and tells you which one it is.

+What size should my og:image be?

1200×630 pixels (a 1.91:1 ratio) as a PNG or JPG under about 300 KB. That size works for large cards on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discord, Slack and WhatsApp.

+Do I need twitter: tags if I already have Open Graph tags?

X reads og:title, og:description and og:image as fallbacks, but you still need twitter:card set to summary_large_image if you want the big image card. Without it, X shows a small thumbnail.

+I fixed my tags but the old preview still shows. Why?

Platforms cache link previews, sometimes for days. Facebook and LinkedIn let you force a refresh with their own debugging tools. On X, Slack and Discord the cache usually expires on its own, or you can add a query string such as ?v=2 to the URL.

+Do you store the pages I check?

No. We fetch the page once to read its <head>, show you the result, and don't save the page or the result. We only fetch public http(s) URLs, and private or internal addresses are blocked.

+Are the previews pixel-perfect?

They're close approximations of each platform's current card layout, built from the same tags the platforms read. Platforms change their designs from time to time, so treat them as a very good guide rather than a screenshot.

One time

A written fix for the batch.

Up to 25 URLs. We check og:image, Twitter cards, size, redirects, and cache, then send copy-paste meta tags within 48 hours. The free single-URL check stays free.

Get the fix report — $9