SEO settings and link previews
What the four SEO fields change, which meta tags they overwrite, and the exact order Insy picks a share image — your upload, then the generated card, then a picture from the page.
Every community and product page already ships with metadata Insy assembles from the item itself. The SEO settings screen lets you overwrite it: the title in the browser tab and in search results, the description under it, and the image that appears when someone pastes your link into a chat.
This page covers the form, where each field lands, and how the share image is chosen. Ranking on the Insy explore page is a different topic — see Getting discovered.
Where the settings live
Open a community and pick SEO in its menu, or open a product and pick SEO there. Both open
the same form, and each shows the public URL the settings apply to — insy.io/communities/<handle>
for a community, insy.io/p/<slug> for a product. A product’s SEO record is also used on the
copy of that product under your creator profile, at /@handle/<slug>.
Two things have no SEO form of their own. Creator profile pages take their title from your display name and handle and their description from your bio, and their share image is the card Insy generates for your profile, falling back to your avatar. Clipping campaigns can serve SEO data through the API but have no screen to fill it in.
The four fields
| Field | Required | Max length | Where it ends up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title | Yes | 255 | title, og:title, twitter:title |
| Name | Yes | 255 | Structured data only — the name in the page’s JSON-LD |
| Description | Yes | 255 | meta name="description", og:description, twitter:description, JSON-LD |
| Image | No | see below | og:image, twitter:image, JSON-LD |
All three text fields are required. You cannot save the form with one of them blank, even if you only came to change the image.
Insy appends " | Insy" to your title everywhere the title is used, so budget for those seven extra
characters. If you never fill the form in, the title and name fall back to the community or product
name, and the description falls back to the item’s own description.
The 255-character limit is enforced by the API, not by the form. There is no character counter and nothing stops you typing past it; the save is simply rejected when you submit.
How the description gets trimmed
On a community page the description is stripped of markdown formatting and cut to 160 characters at the nearest word boundary before it goes into the tags. On a product page a description you wrote yourself is used in full — only the structured-data copy is cut at 160.
So the same 255-character description can appear whole on a product page and truncated on a community page. Put what matters in the first 160 characters either way.
The image field
The picker accepts image files and rejects anything else. The hint under it says 10 MB, and that is a recommendation rather than a rule: the uploader only refuses files above 110 MB, and the API’s own ceiling is 120 MB. A 40 MB photo is accepted without complaint, so treat the 10 MB figure as the guidance it is rather than a limit you will be stopped at.
Your image is delivered resized to 1200 px wide, and the preview panel renders it at a 1.91 crop — the same proportion as Insy’s generated cards, which are exactly 1200x630. An image at that ratio is the one that will not be cropped.
Which image a share actually uses
This is the part that surprises people, because three different images compete and only one wins. Insy checks them in a fixed order.
Your SEO image
If you uploaded one, it wins outright. Nothing overrides it and nothing is layered on top of it — the generated card below is skipped entirely.
The automatically generated OpenGraph card
If you have not uploaded an image, Insy uses the card it rendered for that community or product, provided the card has finished rendering. It is passed through untouched, because it is already exactly 1200x630 and a second resize would soften the text drawn on it.
A picture from the item itself
Last resort. For a community that is the cover image, and the avatar if there is no cover. For a product it is the main cover, then any other background image, then the avatar. Whichever is found is resized to 1200 px wide.
If none of the three exists, the page ships with no og:image tag at all.
Cards are generated for you
You do not switch generated cards on, and there is nothing to design. A background job walks the catalogue every five minutes and draws cards for four things: every active, unsuspended community with a handle, every published product, every creator profile, and every clipping campaign. Drafts and unpublished items do not get one. A single pass renders at most 50 cards, so a large backlog drains over several passes rather than all at once.
A community card carries the name, the verified badge, the avatar and banner, the price and
billing interval of the cheapest active plan, the member count, the rating, and the owner’s handle
and avatar. A product card carries the name, verified badge, avatar, cover, category, rating, and a
price label reading Free, Pay what you want, a single price, or from plus the cheapest one.
Redraws are not instant, and they are not all equally urgent:
- Structural edits redraw at the next sweep — a new name, a replaced banner or avatar, a price change, a different category. Within five minutes, in practice.
- Numbers that drift on their own wait a day. Member count, rating and campaign progress only earn a redraw once the current card is at least 24 hours old, so a counter ticking all afternoon cannot mint a new picture every few minutes.
Each version of a card is published at its own URL derived from its contents, so a redraw means a new URL. The replaced file stays reachable for 30 days rather than being deleted, so links already shared elsewhere keep resolving. If a render fails — an image it needs cannot be fetched, say — the page falls back to the item’s own picture until a later sweep succeeds.
Reading the link preview panel
Beside the form (or above the save button on a narrow screen) there is a Link preview card that
updates as you type, before you save anything. It shows the URL without its https://, the title
clamped to two lines and the description to three — that clamping is display only, not a limit on
what gets published.
Three gaps are worth knowing, because they make the panel disagree with a real share:
- It never shows the generated card. The panel only ever draws the file you just picked or the SEO image already saved. An empty image area here does not mean an empty preview out there — the generated card will still be used.
- It leaves off the
" | Insy"suffix that the real title tag carries. - Its title falls back further than the page does. If the title box is empty the panel shows the saved title, then the name box, then the saved name, then the slug.
Saving clears Insy’s cached copy of the record straight away, so the public page serves your new text on its next load.
On a custom domain the chain is shorter
A product served on a connected custom domain skips the generated
card. There the image is your SEO image, and a product picture if you have not uploaded one —
nothing else. The canonical URL on that page still points back at insy.io/p/<slug>, which is
deliberate: search engines are told the Insy URL is the original.