Dynamically place an image of video overlay on top of a video or image. This action allows you to build highly customised and personalised videos and images at scale.
The New Render Trigger triggers when a new image or video completes rendering. You can use this trigger to access your videos or images the moment they are available, and use your finished renders inside of other Zapier Integrations.
While we have performed numerous tests to ensure the stability of this integration we are still in beta and modules may not behave as expected. The integration is also subject to change and particular modules may not exist in future releases.
Great start - but I was mainly interested in the slideshow possibilities of the Zapier integration. Obviously it can work for a fixed number of images as in your example. But what if I want 30 images - it would be a bit unwieldy to code as in your example. But more importantly, the number of images may vary by customer. I could be missing some advanced functionality of Zapier, but at first glance, I could not work out how to make it work with variable numbers of images. Maybe a better approach would be to supply shotstack with a publicly accessible folder url (containing any number of files for the slideshow), or if that isn’t feasible, a zip file of images. The user would need to ensure the files are named/numbered in the order they want in the slideshow. But that approach would make the process far simpler, in my view. Thoughts?
Yes. I agree. The individual fields make it difficult to use a variable number of photos. I tried a few advanced Zapier modules like storage and loop but they didn’t really make it any better.
I like the idea of the publicly accessible folder, but am not sure whether that would work well when you want to use something like Google Drive or Dropbox that provides you with a single URL.
I’ll have to check whether using a zip file is possible in the backend, but I expect it’ll give the same issue if you want to use the module with something like Google Drive or Google Sheets.
What might work is to provide a comma separated string of urls. In the backend we’d be able to parse these into individual urls and even do some formatting on them if for example you’re providing standard Google Drive links.
Would something like that work for your use case?
Update: I’ve just deployed some changes that should make it easier for you to have variable length slideshows using Google Drive files by doing to url conversion in the backend.
Take a look at the updated article on how to create a slideshow, but in short you can add a maximum amount of image fields based on the maximum amount of images you want to allow in your slideshow.
Zapier should ignore empty input fields effectively allowing you to have slideshows as long as your end-user requires.
Thanks Derk - that removes the main roadblock. Let me investigate if I can find a better way to grab the public links. As a Mac user I did find a promising article on how to potentially create a list public links for Dropbox using Automator and AppleScript. (How to Create a Dropbox Link With AppleScript & Automator) Unfortunately, it seems the use of a Dropbox long-expiry token is to be deprecated, so this would not be a solution for the longer term (hence did not proceed). Ideally, I’d like to throw a bunch of images into a folder and with a mouse click, generate the slideshow. I think one way or another, this should now be possible.
Goodness! Who would have thought that grabbing the public links for direct access to a shared item on Dropbox or Google Drive could be so difficult. But I have managed to figure out a “low touch” way to do what I want in a semi-automated way.
From a folder of images on Google Drive I select the files of interest and using the share icon, I can copy all share links in one go.
Currently I paste them into a spreadsheet, split the text into columns, copy and “paste transposed” to get them into a single column. A text manipulation formula is used to get the URLs in the right format for direct access. (Using the following as reference: How do I display images from Google Drive on a website? - Stack Overflow )
Then I copy the resulting direct access links and paste into an email body as comma delimited string of plain text URLs, sending it to Zapier’s email parser. The body content which only consists of the comma delimited URLs is assigned to a variable. The received email triggers the shotstack video slideshow action which receives the content from the assigned email “slides” variable.
Currently, I have the delay step followed by a “send email” step that sends me the video’s URL.
My focus will now be to simplify/automate the process for getting direct links, as well as investigating the callback function for the completed render.
My wishlist for this video slideshow action would include:
a) allowing different transition effects - maybe the transition parameter could be single value (as now) or optionally take a comma delimited set of transitions to match the supplied order of images (with appropriate fallback in case too many or not enough are specified). Maybe a “random” value could also be accommodated?
b) even better, it would be great to see an extra parameter for motion effect in the Video Slideshow action. At a minimum, a single value for the entire rendition would be welcome. However, as above, it would be nice if, optionally, a comma separated set of values could also be supplied instead - and again, a value of “random” for times when we are too lazy to assign a motion to each slide.
Hope that helps - and thanks for the Zapier integration.
Great work! I tried a few things myself, but couldn’t find an efficient way to get a list of files from Google Drive. I’ve got a feeling Integromat is going to be a better choice to automate in this type of fashion.
On the below, I’ve added a feature request to fix formatting of common storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. That should help not needing to parse odd filenames.
I’ve added your below feature requests to the list. We were already planning to add motion effects such as ken burns, but we’ll need to take a look how we can best add more customisability per slide without sacrificing usability.
