In NetNewsWire 7.0.5 (Mac version available, iOS version coming soon), we made a change to get the feed image from RSS, via the image element.
Weren’t we already doing this? Seems surprising that we weren’t!
It’s because, historically, these images were often rectangular — but the app wants square images. These days, probably due to the influence of mobile apps, images tend to be square, which is great. It means we can use these.
Note to feed publishers
We suggest checking your feeds to see if they are supplying an image URL. Check that…
You’re supplying a URL in the
<image>element in thechannelThe image URL doesn’t return 404 or something unexpected
The image is square
The image isn’t small: 128 pixels per side is probably a good minimum
Note, though, that due to NetNewsWire’s caching — because it’s trying to not hit servers too often — it’s difficult to debug this using NetNewsWire. Changes may take days to take appear in the app.
But if you’ve done the above checks, then it’s good.
What happens when there is no feed image
NetNewsWire will continue to do what it has done for years — it will try to find a suitable feed image by downloading the home page and looking for apple-touch-icon, twitter:image, and og:image URLs. This uses more bandwidth, unfortunately, but it works.
This is why it’s definitely better to supply a feed image. Don’t make the app go poking around!
Example
Here’s an example feed image from Dave Winer’s Scripting News RSS feed:
<image>
<title>Scripting News</title>
<url>https://imgs.scripting.com/2025/06/04/curly.png</url>
<link>http://scripting.com/</link>
<description>Scripting News gets an image because it's part of a network that uses them. 6/4/25 by DW</description>
</image>
The part that NetNewsWire looks at is the <url> part. (We don’t have a use currently for the other parts.)
PS
In case you’re not a NetNewsWire user or aren’t sure what we’re talking about — here’s a screenshot showing a list of articles with feed images on the left:
