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