A project, journal, publication or competition link carries its own title, description and cover image, and normally previews correctly. When the image is missing it is almost always one of the cases below, and most you can fix yourself.
A profile link is the usual culprit
Profiles are the weakest link on UNI, for two reasons.
- You never uploaded a photo. The default avatar is an SVG drawing, and the major networks will not render SVG in a preview card. Nothing is wrong with the link: the image is in a format the scraper refuses.
- You signed up with Google. Your picture is then served from Google at 96 pixels square, and Facebook wants at least 200. It is discarded as too small.
Both are fixed the same way: upload a real photograph to your profile. A JPEG or PNG is then served through our image service at the size networks expect.
A profile with nothing published gives no card at all
If an account has published no projects, journals or publications and has entered no competitions, its profile page is not served to anyone who is not signed in. A preview scraper is never signed in, so it receives nothing and the link stays bare. Publish one piece of work and the profile becomes shareable.
Private and unpublished work has no page to preview
A private project, or a journal still in draft, has no public page at all. Whoever you send it to sees a plain link. That looks identical to a fault but is the visibility setting doing its job. Publish it, or make it public, and the preview appears.
A cover image you changed takes a while to show
Two caches sit between your edit and the card: ours, and the network's own copy of your link, which it holds for days. Facebook and LinkedIn each publish a tool where you paste a URL and ask for a fresh read. That is the quickest way to correct a card you already shared.
Some places do not read our pages properly
- Bluesky and Mastodon do not identify themselves in a way we recognise, so they show a generic UNI card. Nothing on your side changes that.
- Discussion pages have no preview of their own and fall back to the UNI homepage card.
- Help articles preview with a title and description but no image.
If a preview is wrong rather than missing, share the link to the work itself rather than a profile or a list page. Only the work carries its own cover image.