In one sentence: An OG image is the picture a website tells sharing platforms to display alongside its link, named by a single Open Graph tag and usually built around 1200 by 630 pixels so it fills the preview card without awkward cropping.
Every page on a site can name its own share picture. Most sites set one default in the template and override it only on the pages that earn their own, a main service page, a project write-up, a seasonal offer.
The file is not the same thing as a photo on the page. It is made for one job: to be legible inside a rectangle roughly the size of a business card on somebody's phone. A wide shot of a job site with the company name in the corner turns to mush at that size. A flat card with the business name, the city, and one short line reads fine.
The common shape is landscape, around 1200 by 630 pixels. Platforms crop to their own frames, so anything you cannot afford to lose belongs away from the edges. Keep the file reasonably small, too. The preview is built by a machine that fetches the image on a short leash, and a slow file sometimes means no card at all.
One more habit worth having: give the image a stable address. If the file name changes every time somebody re-exports it, old shared links point at a picture that no longer exists. It is also worth looking at the card against a light background and a dark one, because you do not get to choose which of the two it lands on.
Think about how a local business actually gets passed around. Somebody in a neighborhood group asks who does gutters. A past customer replies with your link. That reply sits in a feed next to nine other replies, and for a second or two the share picture is the entire impression of your company. It is your storefront in that thread, and it is the only part of your site that person has seen.
Say a homeowner texts your estimate page to a spouse, as a worked example. The card that lands either says the company name and what you do, or it shows a gray box and a bare address. Both links go to the identical page. Only one of them survives the glance.
The people who share you are not going to fix this for you. They paste the link and move on, and whatever the tag points at is what represents you.
That makes the share card brand work as much as technical work, which is why we treat it as part of branding and not as a leftover file somebody exports at the end.
The image tag is one line inside the larger open graph set that also carries the title and the description under it, so the picture rarely stands alone in a preview. Alt text is a separate job: it describes photos on the page for screen readers and for search, and it does not carry over to the share card. Some platforms read a short alternative text tag written specifically for the share image, which is a different line from the alt attributes on your page photos.
You can, and it beats leaving it empty. But a logo saved on a transparent background renders against whatever color the platform uses, and a square logo gets cropped or padded inside a wide card. A plain rectangle with the logo placed inside it holds up better in more places.
No. One good default covers a whole site. Pages that get shared on their own, like a main service page, a promotion, or a piece of writing you expect people to pass along, are worth a card of their own. Everything else can inherit the default and be fine.
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