Simplifying social media images and text

It just should not be so hard!

I have been working on ways to simplify the creation and posting to social media for awhile - mostly motivated by my friends (and myself) who have small businesses and need to consistently post to social media to ensure that our followers see that we are active. Automating this part of the process (creating and posting) frees up time where we can actually engage with customers or do other things, overall improving the business.

First, I created templates in GIMP. I wrote about GIMP templates back in April. I found having templates really saved me some time, but I still did not use them very much. They clearly did not save ‘enough time’ because I dreaded every time I needed to create social posts - even knowing that I was bulk editing.

Then, I developed an iOS application Social Majik that will resize the same image and text for multiple accounts. It really saved time, but then I was creating images on my phone and needing to type text up separately and then match the text with the images.

Recently, I’ve been looking into ways to batch creations. I intended to use GIMP because of my familiarity with it. However, the command line tools were a little iffy, and I wanted to stick with shell rather than jump over to python for initial tests. I read a ton about ImageMagick through the documentation and examples. I was able to create a script with defaults that would create images with text properly sized for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

The code is so simple, I could easily create multiple images. For example, here is how I could get formatted images for all three social media types with the word “Beautiful” in pink on top of the image that I added. So simple.

bash sgmake.sh all 'Beautiful' pink image-57657.jpeg

I moved forward and created a script that would take an array of images and an array of text and then create a new array of images (in a separate folder) with the text on top of the images. It would be so that if there were 3 images and 15 text strings, there would be 15 images in the final folder and five images each would have the original three as backgrounds. Amazing. This is a real time saver.

Now, I just need to create an interface and figure out how to get it to socials or at least to a phone.

Onward