Discord preview not showing an image

Why this happens

Discord's unfurler fetches og:image when a link is pasted into a channel. The embed image is skipped when:

• og:image is a relative URL — Discord needs a full https:// address
• The image is behind authentication or a private network — Discord's servers cannot reach it
• The image is too large — very heavy files (typically above 8 MB) are skipped
• The core OG tags are incomplete — Discord usually won't show an embed at all if og:title or og:description is missing alongside the image
• The page returns an error status or a redirect Discord chooses not to follow

Discord caches embeds per URL. If a link was shared before the fix, it will show the old (or missing) embed until the cache expires or you share the link again after a cache bust (for example, appending a query parameter).

How to check

Paste your URL into the Open Graph Checker. Confirm that og:image is present with an absolute https:// URL, that the image actually loads publicly, and that og:title and og:description are both set.

How to fix

1. Set og:image to a public, absolute HTTPS URL — https://yourdomain.com/og.jpg.
2. Keep the image under a few megabytes; a compressed 1200×630 JPEG is usually well within limits.
3. Include the full core set: og:title, og:description, og:image, and og:url.
4. Optionally add <meta name="theme-color" content="#…"> — Discord uses this to colour the embed sidebar.
5. Re-share the link (or append ?v=2 to bust the cache) to get a fresh embed.

Example

A page's og:image points to an image on an internal staging server: https://staging.internal/preview.jpg. Discord's crawler cannot reach that host, so no image appears in the embed. Moving the image to the public production CDN and updating the tag to https://cdn.yourdomain.com/preview.jpg makes the full embed render when the link is re-shared.