Why I love Open Graph images

An Open Graph image is the first impression of your link. The whole protocol is defined at ogp.me, a few meta tags that turn a plain URL into a card.

Without this system, we would only see links and their basic descriptions, similar to how links appear within raw HTML.

Looks like:

<a href-"https://www.wikihow.com/">Go to website</a>

That's why Open Graph meta descriptions are actually a great development for the web ecosystem.

With open graphs, before anyone opens your page, they see this. A card, a title, a description. That single image decides whether a click happens or not.

What I love most is when it's dynamic. The blog post's title and description, rendered automatically into the image itself. No designer opening Figma for every post. No manual export. Don't repeat yourself.

For example Slack is doing well on preview images from open graph, while you are sharing your link.

Another example from WhatsApp. Even when you just add a link to the input, it shows you a preview of it directly.

You can make this dynamic, just like in this example. For instance, it can convert whatever is written in this title into an image format right here. 👇🏻

The server (Next JS) just generates it. More detail about Next JS Metadata and OG images: https://nextjs.org/docs/app/getting-started/metadata-and-og-images

That's NOT a marketing trick. That's product thinking applied to a meta tag.

I think this goes further soon. Static images won't be enough. A short video preview, generated the same way, from the same title and description. Also for AI? Maybe.

We're (should) heading toward a space where a link is no longer just something a browser opens as HTML.