WeaponsG.com’s Thumbnail Generator is a lightweight, simple Windows 10 application used to create social media posts for news sites or blogs. The user must input a caption, their logo or a watermark, and a pertinent image from where they can adjust a multiple variables to make the perfect thumbnail. The result is a square 750px image ideal for Instagram.
Coming in the future:
Support for different fonts, the ability to add a custom borders, automatic saving of your border and watermark settings upon exit, more font sizes, and much more. We would appreciate if you could sent us feedback or ideas via our Submit page!
Examples:
How to use:
Make sure you have a logo for your website that has a transparent background (PNG, GIF and BMP are examples of image formats that support transparency). An ideal size (in height) is ~90px to 160px.
When you’re ready to make a post, just download an image that matches the story and decide on a 1-3 line headline for the caption. Ideally, the image should be square, but rectangular photos will turn out fine a long as you set the top/bottom border to be large enough to cover the blank space.
Developer’s tip: Use WinKey+Shift+S to enable Windows Snipping Tool and outline a custom sized screenshot to your clipboard (where you then must paste somewhere to save). Alternatively, you can use one of the many free third party snipping tools out there, like Lightshot. These well let you quickly draw custom sized screenshots and save them to your desktop.
Follow the top-down steps on the right side of the program to fill out all required fields. You can use your mouse to move the watermark as well as the lines of text, and then use the “Center watermark” and “Center TXT” buttons to ensure they’re horizontally centered (the watermark will center both vertically and horizontally).
You can customize the color of all three lines of text, as well as the border’s color using the Windows color dialog. Furthermore, the image can be set to the following size modes: stretch, tiled, centered, and zoomed. This is to ensure that almost all image sizes and aspect ratios will fit inside the bounds without the border obscuring the subject.
Depending on the size of your logo and/or the amount of text used for your caption, the border’s height can be adjusted manually (top and bottom are mirrored).
Once your image is saved (either PNG, JPEG or BMP), it is up to you how you use it. To quickly upload it to Instagram via your PC, WeaponsG.com highly recommends a third party Instagram client for Windows called “Winsta“, available through the Microsoft Store for just $3 USD.
CONS:
- WeaponsG.com’s Thumbnail Generator uses a primitive .NET Framework function to fetch and save the final image that the user generates. No matter the file format it is saved as, the final image will have visible artifacts, especially around text. Thankfully, this is hard to see when viewed at 100% size. When used on social media (and when viewed on mobile), it will be almost always be downsized, further mitigating the problem. We do hope to fix this in the future.
- In its infancy, The WeaponsG.com Thumbnail Generator is only able to spit out a 750px square image. This size is more than adequate for use on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, but might too small for some applications. This is because we want the application, which has a fixed window size, to fit on as many displays as possible. Future updates will address this limitation!