#8: Automate Your Image Creation: How and Why

Check out these 6 tools that enable you to make graphic templates, then automate the creation of your images.

Welcome to the eighth issue of App Chat, the newsletter for busy creators in search of the perfect no/low-code tech stack.

And a special welcome and thank you to the 25 new subscribers since my last issue on November 15th :)

In This Issue

• Which tools will help you automate images

• Why you would ever want to do that

How To Automate Image Creation

Let’s start with the most well-known app in this space…

1) Bannerbear

Starting price: $49/month for 1,000 credits

Bannerbear, as far as I know, was one of the first of these apps to really catch on. It enables you to generate images and videos using a range of integrations and plugins:

• API

• Zapier

• Airtable

• Forms

• URLs

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2) Placid

Starting price: $19/month for 500 credits

Placid is also quite advanced, from what I can gather. And for less than half the cost of Bannerbear, you get the following:

• Airtable

• Ghost

• Zapier

• Webflow

• WordPress

• Make

• Mobile SDK

• Editor SDK

• Studio

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3) Switchboard Canvas

Starting price: $19/month for 1,000 API calls

4) Generatebanners

Starting price: $19/month for 1,000 credits

5) Abyssale

Starting price: $49/month for 1,000 credits (50% deal as of the writing of this)

6) Duply

Starting price: $21/month for 1,000 credits (50% deal as of the writing of this)

Why To Automate Image Creation

Now that you have an idea of which tools will help you to create images on auto-pilot, but why would you want to do that?

Here are some examples (don’t forget the various mechanisms you can use to kickstart these workflows):

1) Social Media Graphics

There are a couple of categories within this one:

1. Graphics that you share on social media, like screenshots on a nice gradient background with some text on the side (for example).

2. Creating Open Graph (social preview) images automatically based on your article/newsletter title, description, the date, etc.

2) Featured Images for Blogs

Often times, writers have similar templates they use for their blog post featured images. You can automatically create those in bulk, instead of one-by-one, manually.

3) Re-Create Tweets Instead of Screenshots

This one is really neat! Instead of taking screenshots of tweets, you can create a template that looks like a tweet, then populate it with data from a tweet (using a tool like Zapier, for example, where you have a workflow that triggers on new tweets).

NOTE: you could do this for other social networks as well, like Instagram.

4) Banner Ads in Multiple Dimensions

If you need the same text and images used across banners of different dimensions, why not input that information a single time and auto-generate the various sizes?

5) Build an App That Creates Images

You can kick it up a notch and build an app (using a no-code tool like Softr, Glide, etc) that takes data and then outputs images. It could be to sell them, to create images for directory entries, to produce certificates, etc.

Well, That's a Wrap

Issue #8 of App Chat is shipped! The new delivery cadence is the 1st and the 15th, and sometimes in between(th).

And yes, I know today is the 2nd of December. I could have shipped yesterday but it would have been rushed. And I wanted to do it well :)

As always, if you’ve got any feedback or questions please let me know!