When you share your Scout's online fundraising page on Facebook, Facebook creates a link preview that usually includes an image from the Scout's page.
Sometimes Facebook may show a generic Trail's End image even though your Scout's photo is correctly displayed on their fundraising page.
Why does this happen?
Facebook creates link previews by reading information from the webpage when the link is first shared or "scraped." Facebook then stores, or caches, that information so it does not need to reload the page every time someone shares the link.
If Facebook originally checked your Scout's page before their Scout photo was available or updated, Facebook may have saved the generic Trail's End image as the preview.
Updating the Scout's photo in Trail's End does not necessarily cause Facebook to immediately check the page again.
Meta explains this process in its documentation:
Images in Link Shares — Meta for Developers
View Meta's Images in Link Shares documentation
How can I refresh the Facebook image?
Meta provides a tool called the Sharing Debugger that can ask Facebook to check the page again.
Make sure the correct Scout photo appears on the Scout's Trail's End fundraising page.
Open Meta's Sharing Debugger.
Paste the Scout's fundraising page URL into the tool.
Select Debug.
Select Scrape Again to ask Facebook to retrieve the current information from the page.
Try creating a new Facebook share after Facebook has refreshed the page.
Facebook Sharing Debugger — Meta for Developers
Open Facebook's Sharing Debugger
Meta specifically recommends using the Sharing Debugger to pre-fetch page information and to update Facebook's information when a shared image changes.
Will clearing my phone or browser cache fix it?
Usually, no.
The link preview is being cached by Facebook, rather than by the Trail's End App, your browser, or your phone. Clearing your device's cache therefore generally will not change the Facebook preview.
Why does the correct picture appear when I text the link?
Different services create and cache link previews independently. A text messaging app may check the Scout's page more recently than Facebook did, so it may already show the current Scout photo while Facebook still shows an older preview.
Can Trail's End manually change the Facebook preview?
There is not currently a setting in Trail's End that allows a parent to manually choose a separate Facebook preview image.