
Show HN: Generate your og:images automatically - aulrich
https://placid.app/
======
aulrich
Hello Hacker-Newsers!

I’m Armin, co-maker of Placid. We deliver Social Images as a Service: Placid
lets you generate nice Share Images for Twitter and Facebook via our API. (And
more Social Image Formats soon!)

Here’s how it works:

1) Choose a preset design from our library.

2) Customize your template with default values for colors, text, photos /
logos.

3) Integrate the meta tags into your project.

4) Change parameters of the Image URL in the meta tag to dynamically fill
elements of the template. You can f.ex. generate your blog article’s title on
to the image or fill a browser window with a screenshot of a website.

We started building Placid as a tool to automate Social Image Generation for
our own projects and we figured it’s something that other people could use
too. For now, we concentrated on providing Meta Images, but we’re already
testing Placid for other use cases, like generated Pinterest Images. So we’ll
soon add:

* An editor to create templates from scratch (and with custom Image Dimensions)

* More options to customize Presets

* More Presets (also for Instagram Posts and Stories, Pinterest Pins, Facebook Posts,..)

We’d love your feedback and suggestions for missing features or preset options
:)

Armin

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tobltobs
Good idea and it looks good so far. I didn't test it out, but I can imagine
that for some cases the fee is worthwhile. I would reduce the amount of "In
the future we will implement ..." on your landing page. You should think about
creating a Wordpress plugin for this.

~~~
aulrich
thank you! :)

> You should think about creating a Wordpress plugin for this.

yes that is definitely on the list!

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kevinyun
This is awesome. I have had the problem that og-image/meta tags are such a
hassle (not hard, but just a hassle) -- and was really putting together an
idea of making it easier (also supporting SERP previews) and via a JS script.
It would use a dashboard so that you didn't have to update the code. But this
is definitely one step closer to never having to worry about og-meta tags
again :)

Question: I scanned through the landing page but didn't really see any
examples of the watermark. Is every og-preview image watermarked?

~~~
aulrich
Thanks for your kind words

That's true, and I have to Update the Landing page to show some Watermark-
Examples also!

but for you now:
[https://placid.app/u/mhick?title=hey%20kevinyun%20look%20at%...](https://placid.app/u/mhick?title=hey%20kevinyun%20look%20at%20my%20nice%20watermark)

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cphoover
I wonder if you could automatically a/b test the impact of changing the
og:images tag has on social media sharing/interaction. That would be a nifty
feature too.

~~~
aulrich
Wow - That sounds indeed nifty - afaik you can only have 1 og:image for a
Facebook Url/Resource - like [https://placid.app](https://placid.app) can just
have 1 image and I can update that via API, but after like 50 Interactions
(Clicks/Likes/Shares) you cannot Update any longer.

I think you cannot test on the basis of one article, but in general, you could
swap between entirely different templates - hmm I should write that down

~~~
dmlittle
I believe Facebook will cache the OG image. You can refresh the cached image
using their debugger[1]

[1]
[https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug)

