This tutorial will guide you on how to create share images for your Ghost publication’s posts and pages. Let's automate your images! 

Create a template for your images

For this tutorial we’re using Placid.app. Placid lets you generate your social media images from custom templates via API or no-code solutions.

First, create a Placid account if you do not have one or sign in if you do. Add the Project Title, Select the Ghost card and click the Create Project button:

Next, add a new template to your project from the template library or design your own:

Select the ‘Open Graph Template’, used for link previews on Facebook, LinkedIn & most other social networks

Why are Open Graph tags important? Open Graph (OG) is a technology that social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., use to pull data from your site when you add a URL of your site in any of your posts on these services. 

Select one of the templates then proceed to customize the layers:

Click on the Test button in the top-right corner to try out dynamic images and texts. Next, click Save and x to exit.

Connect your Ghost publication

Next click on Connect your Ghost publication:

To connect your Ghost publication, you will need to create a custom integration. Go to Settings > Integrations in your Ghost admin and add a new integration.

Copy the Ghost Admin API Key and API URL from your integration details into the fields below.

Add Webhook to your Integration

Setting up the Placid webhook in your Ghost integration settings activates image generation.

Next, we need to add two webhooks to your integration. Copy the Webhook URL below into the Target URL field of both webhooks, and set the Event to Post updated on one, and Page updated on the other.

Create an action to set up your image automation

Click the Create an action button to add an action:

Configure the template & content you want to use for your image automation.

Create an action for Posts updated 

This action will generate images for your posts:

Next, Set up template & input fields:

Finally, Set up output field. This fills the field(s) you set up here with your generated image if they are empty. Turn on output for Facebook Card and Twitter card.

Open Graph Meta Tags are snippets of text that are used to communicate a page's content with social media (such as Facebook and Twitter). It allows integration of your site and Facebook and tells what content shows up when you share a page on Facebook.

Run your automation

After creating your action, you can run it manually to generate images for all your existing content.

Note that Placid won’t overwrite any custom social card images you have previously set. It will only send images to empty fields or update Placid images if you edited your content. In case you want to replace all your old images, or edited your template and want to regenerate your images choose the option run & overwrite.

Voila! That’s it done. Now you’re ready to preview how your posts and pages look when they are shared.

You can preview using Ghost Twitter and Facebook card settings. Placid.app also offers a browser extension that quickly shows you the card previews while you browse.

ABOUT ME

I'm Juliet Edjere, a no-code expert focused on design, product development, and building scalable solutions with minimal coding knowledge.

I document all things product stories, MVP validation, and how designs, data, and market trends connect.

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