Hi ElkQR Team,
I would like to request an improvement to the Social Media Preview behavior of ElkQR short/deep links.
I use ElkQR with custom domains to manage deep links for multiple clients and social media campaigns.
Currently, when Advanced Settings → Social Media Preview is left completely empty, the ElkQR short link displays a generic ElkQR preview such as the ElkQR image/logo and “Link Preview,” instead of preserving the social preview of the original destination URL.
For example, if the destination is a Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or YouTube post/video, I would like the ElkQR short link to automatically display the original thumbnail, title and description when I have not configured a custom preview manually.
Suggested behavior:
1. Custom Social Media Preview filled in → use the custom title, description and image submitted by the user.
2. Social Media Preview left empty → automatically fetch and use the destination URL’s original Open Graph metadata, especially:
og:title
og:description
og:image
For example:
go.ourdomain.com/video
could deep-link to a YouTube, Instagram, TikTok or Facebook post while automatically showing the same thumbnail/title/description as the original destination.
Another service I currently use, MySocial.io, already behaves this way even for the free plan. When I create a SmartLink and leave the preview untouched, its shortened/deep link automatically preserves the original destination’s social preview. I have attached a screenshot showing the difference between the MySocial link and the current ElkQR behavior.
This would be extremely useful for users managing many links or multiple clients because we would not have to manually copy the title, description and image for every link.
It would also mean that if the destination content changes, ElkQR could retrieve its metadata instead of relying permanently on manually entered information.
Technical suggestion: when the custom Social Media Preview fields are empty, ElkQR could fetch the destination page’s Open Graph metadata server-side and serve/mirror that metadata on the ElkQR short URL before redirecting the visitor.
This is important because social crawlers such as WhatsApp, Facebook and others inspect the short URL itself, and a simple redirect does not always guarantee that the destination Open Graph information will be used.
If possible, a “Refresh original metadata” option would also be useful so users could ask ElkQR to re-fetch the destination preview when it changes.
This would make ElkQR significantly more useful as a professional custom-domain + deep-linking solution for social media, while still preserving the existing ability to manually override the preview whenever we want.
Is something like this already possible through an existing setting? If not, I would really appreciate having it considered for the roadmap.
Thank you!