ImageOptomize and SEOmatic - Is Image Variant Required for Social and SEO images?

Question

Do ImageOptomize and SEOmatic work together - or to be more specific do I need an image variant for the social and SEO images defined in SEOmatic?

• I have been importing content into a News entry.
• I am defining my image variations using imageOptimize on the News Volume.
• I have a "meta image" asset field which is being used to serve the SEO and Social Media images to SEOmatic's SEO settings for the entry.

Before installing and using imageOptimize the meta image previews were working fine with SEOmatic in the entry editor. Now they are not getting picked up... do I need to define an image variant that matches the SEO and Meta image sizes?

Also... SEOmatic is such a time saver, I estimate I have saved at least two weeks dev time with this plugin. Thank you Andrew!

Answer 1

I've used SEOmatic and ImageOptimize together before and never had those issues. SEOmatic should care less about the presence of the ImageOptimize field on the asset and you definitely don't need to specify custom ImageOptimize variants for your SEO/social purposes. SEOmatic grabs the raw image (like you would grab the asset url in the templates) and does its own transforms to get that image ready for social/SEO use.

My guess is something is incorrectly setup in the Content SEO settings for whatever section the entry you're currently editing exists in. If you still can't figure it out, I'd be curious to see screenshots of those settings...

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Also, fwiw, Andrew does provide a very handy SEO Settings field that might be worth considering as a replacement to the setup you've got going on currently. As he mentions in the plugin README:

Modern SEO works best if it actually reflects what is on the page, visible to the user, so pulling from your page's content will work well in most cases.

So what I've done (and would recommend, though it would mean you would lose your client-friendly field descriptions) is to pull the SEO/social data out of the content of the page and then add the SEO Settings field to that last tab just in case you need to overwrite stuff. For example, rather than adding the asset used as the masthead image and the asset used for SEO/social separately, use the same field for both. Makes it simpler on the client and on you! And then, if and when you do need a different image for the social/SEO metadata, you can use the SEO Settings field.