Ghost shares the publication cover on every page without a photo
og:image on a Ghost page with no feature image is the site's cover. Substack generates a card per post. Ghost falls back to the wallpaper.
So half the site shares as one gradient
Posts with a photo look great. Everything else looks like the wallpaper.
What's actually wrong
Ghost's tags are complete and well-formed. When a post has a feature image, that image is the card, and it looks great. When it doesn't, Ghost falls back to the publication cover, so the About page, the archive, the membership page, and every post written without a photo all share the same picture. On Ghost's own demo site that picture is a stock gradient from Unsplash. Ghost's forum has asked for a generated per-post image since 2022, with the Substack comparison made explicitly in 2023, and the thread was still active in 2025. Third parties sell into the gap.
This is problem 3 of the 5 ways link previews break. The full breakdown covers the manual fix and the automatic one.
og:image on /about/ → images.unsplash.com/photo-1557682250… (the publication cover)og:image on / → the same Unsplash gradientog:image on /tag/getting-started/ → the same Unsplash gradientog:image on /welcome/ → the post's feature image ✓no feature image = cover image, every timeWhat that costs downstream
The writers who don't do images get the worst cards
Ghost's pitch is to writers. Plenty of them publish text. For them the share card is the publication cover forever, on every post, with no sign of what the post is about.
Substack already does this, and people know
"It would be great if ghost had some way to do something similar" is the top request in a forum thread that ran from July 2023 to August 2025. The comparison is being made by Ghost's own users.
The gap is being filled by other vendors
Placid, Bannerbear, and a community plugin all sell per-post images for Ghost. The platform's own answer is still a manual upload.
The post, as a card
Title, author, and the publication's look, rendered from the page. No photo required.
The pages without a photo
Every one of these shares the cover today. Here is what they could carry.
A tag archive in Slack
The "start here" link a team sends to every new hire.
The homepage on LinkedIn
What the publication looks like when someone recommends it.
For whoever owns the templates
The fallback is the cover
With no feature image, Ghost's og:image is the publication cover. The tag is correct. The value is the same on every page that lacks a photo.
og:image → images.unsplash.com/photo-1557682250… (site cover)The ask has a date on it
The generated-image request was opened in April 2022 and the Substack comparison in July 2023. The thread was still getting replies in August 2025.
One tag in the theme fixes every post
OpenGraph+ renders the card from the post itself, so a text-only post gets a card with its title, author, and the publication's look. One tag in the theme, every post covered.