I run a small content automation pipeline. RSS feeds, AI summaries, auto-publishing — the usual stuff.

Everything was automated except thumbnails.

Every time a new blog post went live, I'd open Canva, drag some text around, pick a background, export it, upload it. 10–15 minutes per post. Multiply that by 8–10 posts a week and you get the picture.

It wasn't hard work. It was boring work. The worst kind.

So I spent a weekend building a workflow that does it for me. Here's exactly how it works.

The setup

My publishing pipeline already ran on n8n. When a new post goes live on my blog, a webhook fires and kicks off a chain: notify newsletter, post to Twitter, update Notion.

Adding thumbnail generation was just one more node.

The idea: when a post publishes → generate a thumbnail → upload it back to the CMS.

The HTTP node that does the work

I used ThumbAPI — a REST API that takes a title and returns a ready-made thumbnail image.…