Thumbsmith is a tool for site owners and web developers who care about the details. It lets you easily add dynamic "Link preview" thumbnails to your site's pages, this way, when links to your site are shared on the internet, a nice, on-brand image with useful information can be shown instead of a generic picture.
Ultimately, it helps content-centric websites increase engagement and click-through rates on their links, improve their site's sharing experience and, as a bonus, gain some awareness on where and how often of their links are shared on the web.
Check out the home page to learn more !
Youtubers spend coutless hours editing, tweaking and optimizing their video thumbnails so they can better attract people to their content, and it's worth it! Link thumbnails are an amazing place to quickly inform, interest and captivate users.
It's a chance to give a taste of your brand, provide additional useful information and get a message in front of people, before they even click!
With a nice, well though-out formula for a thumbnail, you can summarize content and inform users about a link they're looking at in a much more concise manner than what a title and description ever could.
Unfortunately, most sites completely neglect this, opting to display a generic image for their whole site, or a irrelevant photo that simply takes screen space and bandwith without value.
Of course, you can also resort to manually creating these thumbnails via an image editing software, but this also means opening the door to a lot of unecessary extra work!
Instead, you can find a good formula (template) for every type of content that you produce and automate the whole process.
With Thumbsmith, you can do that in minutes, on any web platform!
In short, you provide the service with custom HTML/CSS templates, then a simple, public-facing "API" will be created for each template. Starter templates are available to get you setup quickly.
This "API" will return rendered pictures of your templates dynamically based on the variables you provide via query parameters - all in a scalable, production-ready way. You don't have to manage anything else. We manage the file storage and caching, cache-invalidation and image rendering for you.
Once you created and uploaded a template, you need to "Hook up" your templates to your website via meta tags in your site's <head>
. You can use your framework / environment of choice to create the URL strings, passing variables to your templates via query string parameters.
Check out the use a template on your site page for more info on that part.
For JavaScript environments, we made a tiny utility function (@thumbsmith/url) to help with the strings.
For PHP environments, you can use the native http_build_query
function.
Ready to start?
Create an account and check out the create your first template page!