Field notes
Playbooks, teardowns and the occasional argument — everything we have learned helping creators grow across every major platform.
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.
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.
Pinterest serves every Pin at four fixed widths and keeps the original under a path the interface never links to. Here is how to get the file as uploaded.
Copying hashtags out of a screenshot by hand is how most people do this. Here is how to pull them off a public post from its URL, and what the limits are.
Comment-as-hook is a format now. Here is how to draw a TikTok comment card that reads as real, including the Creator chip almost every generator gets wrong.
Draw a Facebook post card for a slide or a client mock-up, in desktop or mobile width, without screenshotting a real feed and cropping four things out of it.
Instagram removed the embed button from the web interface, but the embed itself still works. Here is how to build the code from a post URL, in both forms.
Every platform publishes embed code and most hide it. Here is where each one keeps it, when to use an iframe instead of a script, and what to do about consent.