Twitter Cards Validated and Preview OK but Photos not are pre-expanded

[BikerBandanas]

Twitter cards have been validated and approved (Product / Summary with Large Image / Photo) and they all preview correctly in the Twitter Validator but when being posted to Twitter from the website via AddThis the photos do not display. You have to click another link to get them to show…

We have tried this on Product Cards, Summary with Large Image and Photo Cards and all have the same problem i.e. they preview OK but when tweeted from the website the photos do not show unless another link is clicked.
We have also tested this on all browsers so this is not a browser issue.
The code added to the website is correct i.e it previews OK in the validator.
Is this a problem with AddThis?

The purpose of using Twitter cards on the website is so that customers and prospective customers can tweet photos of the products that they have or are about to purchase from our website. So why are the photos not displaying as per the preview? Having to click another link to see the photos is defeating the whole object of using Twitter Cards.

Many thanks for any input

[andypiper]

This is working as designed. Users get to choose to click the Expand link to view the card.

Cards do not expand by default (with the exception of those in Promoted Tweets, or photos natively uploaded to Twitter and not using a card on a third party website).

[zbeat]

@andypiper Clever (cheating?) app developers and publishers can work around this photo card limitation by natively tweeting the article link via the Twitter API, with the image in question attached as a media upload. Recommended? Is there a policy against that?

[andypiper]

I don’t really see that as an issue given that you’re posting media to the Twitter API - but then there’s really no point in implementing the card on the website.

[BikerBandanas]

@andypiper

Thank you for your reply. If as you say the cards are ‘working as designed’ then the Preview function in Twitter’s validator is grossly misleading.

It ‘previews’ the cards in their expanded state and nowhere does it clarify that another link will have to be clicked to see the photos. Had we been aware that another link would have to be clicked to see the photos we would not have wasted our time implementing Twitter Cards across all our web properties - or perhaps that was why Twitter failed to include this fact realising that this would render Twitter Cards virtually useless.

I am seriously considering removing all Twitter Cards along with all Twitter sharing buttons from all our web properties and to suggest to customers and visitors who wish to share photos for them to do so via GooglePlus, Pinterest and Facebook where photos are clearly and immediately visible on the respective social sites.

I expected better from Twitter.

[andypiper]

Thanks for this feedback, and apologies for the disappointment this has caused. That’s a useful idea, adding a note to the validator indicating that cards are not expanded so that there’s no further confusion. I’ll also raise a ticket to make sure we make this clearer in the developer docs.

[orta]

Thank you for your reply. If as you say the cards are ‘working as designed’ then the Preview function in Twitter’s validator is grossly misleading.

This really should get put in the validator.