Twitter Cards Images are Cached

Recently, I learned in a not-so-enjoyable fashion that Twitter caches summary card images.

While writing Verify Jekyll Minima Sites on Mastodon, I originally had a summary card image which was getting cropped poorly, so I kept the image that was being displayed at the top of the article but changed the summary card image with a wider version which got a better crop. And it showed up correctly in my preferred Twitter Card preview tool: BannerBear Twitter Card Preview Tool.

But when I posted it to Twitter, the old image would show up both when I actually posted it and in the preview when I was composing it.

After some frustrating troubleshooting, I found this support forum thread that said Twitter caches summary images for about a week, and the preview tool could be used to expire the cache.

And while the preview tool, no longer actually shows you a preview of a tweet, it does bust the cache.

Unfortunately, this type of amateurism is typical of Twitter.

I am not really happy with my investigation into this issue. I wonder if there is a way to accurately preview tweets with the cached images.