An open source API for generating social images — OG IMPACT

4 min readApr 1, 2020

Nearly 12 months after live coding an open source image generator for Node.js, I’m excited to announce OG IMPACT: a simple API to dynamically generate beautiful social media images! 🎉

As our social feeds get noisier, it’s become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Especially for platforms driven by dynamic, user-generated content.

Adding relevant Open Graph tags to your pages is considered one of the best ways to address this ( Tumblr boosted their social CTR 2.5x), and the right image can make your content pop when it’s shared. But if that content is dynamic, manually creating images for each page isn’t an option.

OG IMPACT makes generating unique Open Graph images as simple as making a GET request: https://ogi.sh/?title=Hello%20World.

This product is built for developers. No JavaScript snippets, no backend integration, no image hosting necessary. Just point your meta tag to the API, and that's it:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://ogi.sh?title=Hello%20World" />

You also get unlimited image requests, so it doesn’t matter how much your page is shared. This is thanks to an infinitely scalable serverless caching architecture powered by Saasify.

It’s small, but mighty:

Near-zero code integration
Free template gallery
Unlimited image requests
Custom templates with HTML + CSS
Codepen-style template editor (view in Chrome)
100% open source

OG IMPACT for Individuals & small teams

OG IMPACT is totally free to get started with, offering a free template gallery to rapidly generate images for your site. No sign-up needed.

Simply call the public API to generate an image: https://ogi.sh?title=Hello%20World.

You can also customise the free templates by adding query params to the URL. Let’s change the background using the unsplashId param:

Or add a logo URL using the logo param:

Got some richer content? An article perhaps? Check out the article template:

Or even this jaunty little number, the fiftyfifty template:

Once you’ve found something you like, let social media platforms know about it by adding the <meta /> tags to your page <head />:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://ogi.sh?title=Hello%20World" />

To add more services like Twitter, check out the docs.

You’re also able to share these image URLs directly or upload them to cloud storage if you need to.

OG IMPACT for business

You already have an awesome brand, so why not show it off?

OG IMPACT supports building custom HTML + CSS templates via a Codepen-style template editor for when a free template doesn’t quite cut it.

Customer showcase

wellpaid.io

OG IMPACT’s first customer? Me! I run wellpaid.io and have thousands of dynamic pages that need rich social images. This is the whole reason I built OG IMPACT. Here’s my template in action:

Offset Earth

My first real paying customer, the awesome team over at Offset Earth. I landed this customer before launching! Their CTO got in touch back when I was live coding the OSS library that became OG IMPACT.

Offset Earth use it to show off how many trees you’ve planted: