Like many here, I make a lot of text on image posts to social media. Quotes, etc.
I was sick of doing copy and paste, but still wanted a way to create a high quality output. I didn’t want to pay for expensive software like Illustrator or InDesign, which would be the obvious choice.
After quite a bit of a hunt I found an online programme called Lucidpress. It’s basically a mail merge for graphic files.
You create the template, put in holder text where you want the text to be and then connect it to a CSV file. It then generates unique images for each row of the CSV. This will save me hours and still create awesome looking images.
It costs $5 a month, but you can get a 14 day trial if you sign up for the team version. That’s more than enough time to generate thousands of images.
Here’s how it works:
- Sign up for a Lucidpress account. Agree to the extended trial.
- Choose a template and set-up the graphics. They have a couple of Insta templates to build from.
- Create a text field.
- Go to ‘Insert’ > 'Mail Merge Field"
- Type in the name of the column you want to use. It’s got to match exactly so stick to one word.
- Create your spreadsheet in Google Sheets/Excel/Etc and then save it as a CSV file.
- Go back to Lucidpress and click ‘Download’ in the top right corner.
- Select PNG or JPEG in the ‘Format’ drop down
- Click on ‘Choose file’ in the dialog box that opens on the right hand side.
- Click ‘Download’
The tool will then cycle through each line of the CSV and generate each of the images for you. Done!