Mostly in the heading, I tried substack but hated it so am now signed on to ghost pro. The one thing I thought seemed useful was the image substack generated to help promote posts on social. It would be great if ghost had some way to do something similar, but looking at the integrations ghost offers it looks like they’re more geared towards embedding social content in ghost, not sharing ghost content to social.
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Ghost shares the feature image of your post on social media. Are you expecting something else?
The issue is I don’t really use images. It’s all just writing or audio posts, so there’s nothing for Ghost to post, which is why I’m asking this question.
In the post editor, there’s an option to set a custom message for social media sharing. You can set a custom image that’s used on FB, Google, and many other places via Facebook card, as well as one that’s used on Twitter, or uh, X via Twitter card.
While these images aren’t autogenerated, they can be created fairly efficiently using Canva or something similar.
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Not really, but there are services like Canva that can help you with this… there was another that had automatic hooks and a ghost integration, but I can’t remember the name, and it was only free for a seven-day trial.
You’re thinking of Placid - add a hook to fire on Publish under Custom Integrations and you’re all set. Can pull the Title from Ghost and overlay it on social media cards.
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I agree that is one of the, very few, really useful things about Substack. Not having to spend time on a third party option like Canva, Creatopy or similar to create social media posts is such a time saver. I also believe Substack are very much aware how useful it is cause they also put ones Substack url into the graphics even when one is using ones own domain…
Placid finally enabled WebP image format, and select’able JPEG/PNG,
previously it was always PNG if the background was transparent.
I really like Placid - it’s “set and forget” and it keeps grinding away in the background.
I will bump this thread up a bit. It is such a nifty feature to get some auto generated images to use on social platforms or message apps. Cause after giving myself time to think why I am not using social media to promote my website I realised the idea of inventing the wheel again so to speak is my main issue for not doing it.
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I could really use this feature too. I’m spending way too much time trying to recreate what Substack does so well natively in terms of social promotion material for authors’ posts. Have you thought about adding this to the Ideas category?
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The share images is is still something I believe Substack does well.
So a followup question, now when on Ghost 6.0 “the image” one get when pressing share from the back end would not be possible to turn into something one can download and share. It would have made things so simple 
I think with the new “profile share image” of Social Web, we have a good running concept of creating social media share image in Ghost. I mean this screen:
This feature runs on client-side, and has quite much flexibility in terms of customization. I think this same approach can be used in post share dialog too.
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Yeah, I saw that one. For me that one doesn’t do much good. Cause my prospect reader group are like still excited over Instagram. But follow up question. It says threads and Mastodon. Does this mean this thing auto creates user accounts there too? I put Bluesky to on and was autogenerated a user account I do not need nor want since I already have one with my actual handle. Now it seems impossible to turn off.
Mastodon accounts can follow Ghost built-in, because it just works with ActivityPub protocol. I think Theads currently doesn’t support following ActivityPub accounts but allows other activitypub servers to follow Threads accounts.
Bluesky doesn’t use ActivityPub protocol, so that bridge service connects your account to an automated Bluesky account. Here is the information about disabling your bridged account: Bridgy Fed
That looked promising until I copied and pasted the image, and it loses all graphics, just leaving the text and the overall shape. The same thing appears to happen when I paste the image into a new Note to share.
Hmm, interesting. I also noticed same issue on some of my sites. Apparently it can not handle loading some type of avatars and cover images. I’ll report a bug for this.
So apparently a not good enough solution for social media image generation, just yet 
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Mine are likely to be webp and/or png’s. I’ll check.
It’s a CORS problem. I opened a GitHub issue: Share profile image generation is broken for some avatars and cover images · Issue #24600 · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub
If you just use your websites’ default logo and cover image, it works (because it comes from same domain). If you upload custom avatar and cover image for Social Web, it doesn’t work.
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When I first noticed this I was using the default image/avatar.
Let’s track under GitHub issue to keep this topic focused.