Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
Leave the preheader empty and every inbox fills it from the first text in your email — usually a link nobody clicks. It is the cheapest fix in email marketing.
Gmail on a desktop gives a subject line about 340 pixels — the tightest surface in email. A phone gives more. The count that matters is a width, not a character total.
Google gives a desktop snippet two lines and a phone three. The useful target is one clear promise inside about 155 characters — and Google may still use a passage instead.
A title tag is cut by width, not by character count. The desktop column is about 600 pixels — which is anywhere from 45 to 75 characters depending on the letters.
A search snippet is assembled, not published. Google picks the title, often rewrites it, chooses the description from the page, and cuts both to fit a fixed column.
Alt text is read by people, not just crawlers. Where each platform hides the field, what a good description does, and why reused images lose theirs.
The picture rendered fine when you pasted it and is a broken icon now. The expiry was in the URL the whole time — here is how to read it.
Bluesky is the one platform that will simply tell you what is on a post. You get every image, the alt text, and the file exactly as it was uploaded.
Threads answers a signed-out request honestly, which makes it one of the easier platforms to get a picture out of. Two details are worth knowing first.
Two different links, two different routes. A post gives you what its link card publishes; a Page gives you its picture at the size Facebook stores.
Instagram publishes a larger copy of every public post's picture so link cards can render it. Here is how to reach it, and why the link stops working.
X keeps one file per photo and serves it at six named sizes. The timeline shows you a middling one; the largest is a single word away in the URL.