Images for publishers: article previews, newsletter headers and social cards at scale

Publishers share every article, and every shared article shows a preview: the og:image (Open Graph protocol) in link cards on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, WhatsApp, Slack and Discord. Most sites either reuse the article photo — cropped differently by each app — or a generic logo card. Add social cards, quote cards for the best line, breaking-news alerts, newsletter headers and pins, and image production becomes a daily queue. With Shareglint each format is a template and the article's own data fills it, so images appear when articles do.

A preview for every article, including the archive

The card that matters most is the link preview. Three ways to cover every article, from least to most code:

• Auto OG — one tag in the site's <head> reads each page's title, description and image and renders a branded card, for domains you allow (OG images without code). On WordPress, see WordPress OG images without code.
• Signed URL in the article template — the template computes an image URL from the headline, section, author and photo, signed with your secret; nothing is rendered until a crawler fetches it (signed image URLs).
• API at publish time — the CMS's publish hook calls POST /v1/images and stores the URL with the article.

The first two are lazy: an archive of 20,000 articles costs renders only for the articles people actually share. What a preview should look like on each network is on what an Open Graph image is and OG image size.

Templates for an editorial week

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 1.91:1 link card, the square or 4:5 social post, the 9:16 story and the 2:3 pin from the same request. The blog and news categories of the gallery show them rendered.

Breaking news without a designer

A breaking-news card is the same layout every time — a label, a headline, a location, a time. Call the API from the publish hook with breaking-news and the story's fields, and the social card exists when the story does:

curl -X POST "https://shareglint.com/v1/images?wait=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "template": "breaking-news",
    "sizes": ["og", "square", "story"],
    "format": "jpeg",
    "modifications": {
      "kicker": "Breaking", "headline": "City council approves the new tram line",
      "location": "Wrocław", "source": "Northwind Times", "timestamp": "14:05",
      "photo": "https://cdn.example.com/photos/tram.jpg"
    }
  }'

Long headlines shrink to fit their box instead of running off the image. A still image renders in seconds; correcting a headline is a new request with new values, and the old card stays at its own URL.

Newsletters

A header per issue — issue number, date, the three lead stories — is weekly-digest or newsletter-issue rendered once per send. For personalised images (the reader's name, their city's weather), a signed URL in the mailing tool's merge field renders on delivery (personalised email images). Use JPEG or PNG in email; WebP is not supported everywhere (Can I email).

Pins and social posts

Lifestyle, food and how-to publishers can get real traffic from Pinterest: a 2:3 pin per article, published by Pinterest's own RSS auto-publish (Pinterest pins). For social teams, the same article data fills quote cards and carousels (social media images).

Corrections and updates

Headlines change after publication — a typo, a new development, a legal fix. Because an image's URL is tied to its values, a corrected headline is a new image at a new URL: update the article's og:image (the signed URL in the template changes by itself when the headline does) and the next share shows the correction. Networks cache previews, so links shared before the correction may keep the old card until the network fetches the page again; most offer a debugger that refreshes it, and our guide to stale previews covers each one.

Fonts and brand

Templates use the font families installed on our renderer (GET /v1/fonts); you cannot upload your house font files. Publications with a distinctive typeface should check the list first and choose the nearest installed family, or keep the headline in the photo-free part of the card where the difference matters less. Colours (accent) and light or dark theme apply to every template.

Cost

One render per image and size; repeats are free, and lazy URLs render only what is shared. A site publishing 30 articles a day, with a link card and a square post for each, is about 1,800 renders a month. The Free plan's 100 renders carry a watermark; Starter is $9 a month for 2,000 renders, Pro $29 for 10,000 (pricing).

What it does not do

• No CMS plugins: WordPress and every other CMS use auto OG, a signed URL in the template, or an API call.
• No photo editing or AI-generated images; the template lays out the photo and text you send.
• No posting to social networks or scheduling; your social tool does that with the image URLs.
• No font uploads.