Images for podcasts: episode cards, guest announcements, quotes and thumbnails from your feed

A podcast publishes the same set of images every episode: the "new episode" card, the guest announcement, a quote card with the best line, a YouTube thumbnail if the show is filmed, a story on release day. Each is a fixed layout with a new title, number, guest and photo — exactly the data your RSS feed and show notes already hold. With Shareglint those layouts become templates, so release day's graphics come out of the feed instead of an evening in a design tool.

The templates

Every one renders in every size preset (og 1200×630, square 1080×1080, portrait 1080×1350, story 1080×1920, pinterest 1000×1500, youtube 1280×720): the square post, the 9:16 story, the 16:9 thumbnail and the link preview from one request. The podcast template page shows them in the square size.

Release day from the RSS feed

A podcast is distributed as an RSS feed (RSS 2.0 specification), and automation tools can watch it. The workflow in n8n, Make or Zapier:

1. Trigger: a new item in the podcast's RSS feed.
2. HTTP request to POST /v1/images?wait=true with the episode's title and number from the feed:

{
  "template": "podcast-episode",
  "sizes": ["square", "story", "youtube"],
  "format": "jpeg",
  "modifications": {
    "title": "How small teams ship weekly",
    "show": "Northwind Radio",
    "episode": "Episode 142",
    "guest": "with Ana Ruiz",
    "duration": "48 min",
    "cover": "https://cdn.example.com/show-cover.jpg"
  }
}

3. Next steps take the image URLs: a social scheduler for the square post and the story, YouTube Studio or the YouTube API for the thumbnail (YouTube thumbnails), the episode page's og:image.

JPEG is the format for anything posted to Instagram by a tool, since its publishing API accepts only JPEG (Instagram content publishing). Episode titles in feeds can be long; titles shrink to fit their box, but a short "headline" field in your show notes often reads better on a card than the full episode title.

Guests and quotes

A guest announcement a few days before release is podcast-guest with the guest's photo and title, sent from the same spreadsheet or calendar where you plan episodes. After release, the quote card: pick one line per episode, add the timestamp, render podcast-quote in the square and story sizes. Both work as a batch too — a season's guest cards from one CSV, every row an image and the whole set in a ZIP. Rows per batch by plan: Free 50, Starter 500, Pro 1,000, Scale 2,000, Business 5,000.

The back catalogue

Shows with a long archive often have no consistent episode art. Export the feed's items (from your host, or by reading the RSS feed), keep the title, number and guest columns, and send them as one batch: 200 episodes in two sizes is 400 renders, once, and every image comes back with your id. Re-running after fixing a typo renders only that episode again.

Keeping the look consistent

A show's graphics work best when every episode looks like the same show. Set the template's accent to your brand colour and theme to light or dark once in the automation, use the show cover as the cover image on every card, and keep the guest photos in the same shape and light. If the built-in layouts are close but not quite yours, copy one into your account and change the HTML and CSS — the fields stay the same, so the automation does not change. Seasons can get their own accent colour by changing one value in the workflow.

Moving announcements

A short animated card — the episode number counting in, the title sliding up — can be rendered as an MP4 of up to 5 seconds from a template's CSS animations, at 5 renders each (HTML to GIF and MP4). It has no sound: this is not an audiogram tool, and waveform videos with audio are a different kind of product.

Cover art

Your show cover is made once and has to meet each podcast directory's requirements, which change from time to time; design it carefully and check it against your host's and the directories' current rules. You can build it as a square template here (templates can be up to 4,000 pixels per side), but the value of templates is in the images you make every week, not in the one you make once.

Cost

One render per image and size; repeats are free. A weekly show with an episode card in three sizes, a guest card and a quote card in two sizes uses about 30 renders a month. The Free plan's 100 renders carry a watermark; Starter is $9 a month for 2,000 renders (pricing).

What it does not do

• No audiograms, waveforms or audio in any output.
• No integration with podcast hosts or directories; the RSS feed and automation tools are the bridge.
• No posting to social networks or YouTube; your scheduler or script does that with the image URLs.
• No transcription or quote picking — choose the line yourself, or let your AI tool suggest it and send it on.