#149 – Corey Maass on Optimising WordPress Images

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, optimizing images in your WordPress projects.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice. Or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Corey Maass. Corey has been building for the web since 1996, with a focus on WordPress since 2011. He started his first SaaS app in 2004, and is launched dozens since. For over 10 years, he’s combined his love for entrepreneurship and WordPress by building, launching, and selling numerous WordPress plugins and SaaS apps built on WordPress. Currently he’s focused on the OMGIMG WordPress plugin.

In this episode, Corey talks about the role of social media, and your websites, presence on social platforms. He talks about how optimized web sharing images are important in today’s digital landscape. He explains how shareable webpages on platforms like X, and Facebook, drive online traffic more than direct visits, and emphasizes the power of third party endorsements in adding credibility and authenticity.

He discusses the need for efficient, user-friendly, solutions built for this task, right inside of WordPress. A time-saver for anyone tasked with updating content in multiple places.

Corey also talks about the latest technological advancements, including WebAssembly, and how modern image formats like WebP and AVIF can offer higher quality images with smaller file sizes.

We get into the challenges and future improvements due to come in the WordPress Media Library. The significance of dedicated tools for image creation, and how Corey’s OMGIMG plugin leverages is in-browser capabilities to simplify image handling without relying on server side processes.

Towards the end, Corey shares his insights on how custom social images can enhance engagement and conversions, and the importance of optimized images in improving online content presentation.

If you’re a WordPress user looking to streamline your workflow, and boost your social media game, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes

as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you Corey Maass.

I am joined on the podcast today by Corey Maass. Hello Corey.

[00:03:35] Corey Maass: Hello.

[00:03:36] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Corey’s joining us today and we’re going to talk about images, which we haven’t done for the longest amount of time. It may seem like images are, well, a pretty obvious subject, but there’s a load more to it, especially in the recent past. Things have been changing within browsers and within WordPress.

Corey, just before we begin that, I wonder, would you mind just telling us a little bit about your background, especially with WordPress, and some of the things that you’ve created in the WordPress space. I know you’ve been on the podcast before, but people might like to hear it again, or if they’ve never heard your voice, they’d hear it for the first time.

[00:04:06] Corey Maass: I honestly have to describe what I look like. There’s no end of irony that we’re going to talk about imagery on an audio only podcast. I also got all dressed up. I’m here in a bird suit, with a mohawk, and disco ball glasses, but nobody can see it.

But there is something to be said, I mean, maybe we’ve actually made a higher level point here of just how powerful imagery can be.

Anyway, hello, hello. I’m Cory Maass. I currently live in New Hampshire in the northeast of the United States. I’ve been building websites since the late nineties. Yes, I am that old. Experienced, wizened.

I caught the SaaS entrepreneurial bug in the early two thousands, and so I’ve got a long history of building websites, building web apps, trying to build businesses online.

Along the way WordPress started taking off, and I think I got started around 2010 with WordPress. For a long, long time was building WordPress websites for clients during the day as a freelancer, and then working on SaaS apps and other products at night. And then at some point went to, I was living in Nashville at the time, and I went to WordCamp Atlanta and met a bunch of people who were building successful businesses within WordPress, off of plugins in particular. And I went, what am I doing? Why am I separating, keeping these things separated?

Ever since then, my focus has been, I still freelance during the day, but also building products and services around WordPress, because WordPress just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and people seem to like it.

[00:05:41] Nathan Wrigley: Do you want to just tell us some of the products that you’ve had? I mean, some of them may have come and gone. I’m not sure if they’ve all stood the test of time, but it’d be interesting to hear the range of things that you’ve built.

[00:05:51] Corey Maass: Yeah, the first big product that I built was Kanban Board, so kind of a Trello built into WordPress. Because at the time I was CTO at a music startup. It was Nashville after all. And running a small tech team, we didn’t need any of the big, big Jira style project management suites. And being a typical developer, I can’t bring myself to use somebody else’s product. I have to build it myself.

I actually saw value, since we’re dipping into, at least my original vision was we were dipping into WordPress all day, every day. And if I’m working with clients who are signing into WordPress, why make them sign into something else?

And then also GDPR was starting to take hold. There were a lot more concerns about privacy and where is your data stored, and especially for project management, a lot of this stuff can be proprietary.

And so I ran that for a handful of years. Grew it to some success, but never enough to become my day job. It was a lot of fun. Some interesting use cases. It wound up being used more by small HVAC companies, you don’t know what that is. Heating and air conditioning type companies, because most of them had some sort of basic WordPress brochure site. And then they had, somebody’s nephew worked in house as the, quote unquote, IT guy. And so here’s just an easy way to get everybody to use a simple project management, or in this case more like sales tracking going sideways, or account tracking.

Somebody had called and made an appointment, the truck is out, the repairs are done, we’ve ordered the parts, blah, blah, blah. You know, as you move across columns.

Sold that, probably five years ago now, and then started, very typical developer. So I’m also a musician, DJ and music producer, and was doing more marketing for myself as a musician for a while there. Again, typical developer, everybody around me was using Linktree as a, that one pager. About.me is another one. Or Carrd, with two Rs is another one.

Typical me, I was like, I will not pay $ 8 a month. I will dedicate hundreds of hours of my life to build my own. But I actually, again, I saw a good use case inside WordPress, and it was an interesting experience because I did submit a free version to the plugin repo, and the plugin team initially pushed back hard because they’re like, you basically built WordPress inside WordPress. Why would you do this?

But I’m like, there’s a difference between all of the pages on your website and the one page, mobile friendly, landing page that you’re going to link to from all of your socials. Very different use case.

They did eventually approve it. Ran that for a few years, but it was never, again, I built it because I could, not because I was really so impassioned with it. I used it, I still actually use it. But then I sold that two years ago at WordCamp US. I stood up in the cafeteria and held up a placard, that’s not true, but did meet with the buyer at WordCamp US, which was great because we got to actually go over all the documentation and everything in person. And he took that and ran with it.

I was offloading that. Again, I built it because I could, not because I really was in love with that concept. And then also I had started working with Cory Miller on what was to become OMGIMG, which is my current plugin that I’m building, promoting, pushing.

Fast forward to now where, again, freelancing during the day, but also working hard to flush out the product that I’m currently working on called OMGIMG, which builds featured images, generates featured images edits, featured images, but also open graph images, the images that you see when you share a URL on Twitter, now X, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or any of those. That little preview that you see, that image, that’s called an open graph image. A lot of people just call it the social image. But it’s kind of a hole in a lot of people’s WordPress websites, and so that’s the problem I’m trying to solve.

[00:09:50] Nathan Wrigley: We’ll get into that I think a little bit later, because it’d be really interesting to think about whether a featured image has certain success criteria attached to it, if you know what I mean. Especially if you want to deploy it in certain places, like maybe a YouTube thumbnail image, or something like that, or a blog post image. I wonder if there’s certain criteria which tick boxes for success and otherwise.

But before we get to that, I think it’s really interesting, if you rewound the clock 25 years, the internet was text, basically it was just text. It was a bunch of texts with hyperlinks and that was it.

Fast forward, images come along. And now really it’s more or less everything. It’s audio, it’s video, and increasingly I think audio and video are kind of, especially video, are really taking over. It’s dramatic what can be done on the internet more broadly, including apps and things like that.

But images, a seriously important part of it. And if you were to strip out images from just about any website that you visit on a daily basis, and take a look at it. It would probably feel, kind of a poor version of the original. So images are really important.

For the longest time, we’ve been familiar with the image formats of JPEG and PNG, that’s how I pronounce it. I’m sorry, I know people pronounce it in different ways, like ping and so on. But more recently there’s been some images, new formats coming along out of some different companies. So for example, Google, I think were behind the WebP image format. And I don’t know who’s behind the AVIF image format, but I know that’s gaining in popularity.

The browser support, depending on which month you’re listening to this in will be different. But it’s climbing and climbing, to the point where I think most of those image formats can be fairly used.

There’s a whole environmental debate about pushing pixels around, and whether or not that’s good for the environment. You know, a large image that doesn’t need to be large is pointless and wasteful.

Then you’ve got things like SVGs, scalable vector graphics. The point is it’s complicated, and it’s getting more complicated.

Where are we right now in terms of the state of images? Should we now no longer be using things like JPEGs and PNGs? Should we be using these more modern WebPs and AVIF formats?

[00:11:53] Corey Maass: 50, 50. There’s no right answer, or there’s no clear answer. It’s Google, right? So they were hyping their new format, which in many instances is better. In that you can push higher quality images, bigger images, essentially by having a file size be smaller, they will be delivered faster.

But I’ve found that it’s not a hundred percent better. It was supposed to be the silver bullet. But I mean, there’s a reason why these other image standards came along and have stuck around for so long, they have solved a problem, right? And at the end of the day, there are still zeros and ones behind all of this. And so you can only push things so far. You can only encode so much data at such a small size or whatever.

So there’s no harm in using these things. Personally I struggle with, this is a very edge case scenario, but I struggle with these other formats because they don’t download easily and, or you can’t necessarily download them and then view them in other apps, or you can’t drag them from window to window. And most people don’t use the internet like I use the internet, I’m a developer, and site maintainer, and whatnot. So I’m constantly interacting with things. But that’s another little thing.

So for me, what I advise most of my clients to do is stick with PNG if it’s graphics, big blocks of color. JPEG if it’s photo, lots of detail, gradients. And then we use a plugin. And there are a number of plugins for WordPress that will convert to these other formats. And so then you kind of don’t have to worry about the delivery.

And the other thing that we’re running into now is people taking pictures with their phones, which again ends up being HEIC, another format, which is not easily, previewable in some apps, depending on what platform you use and yada, yada, yada.

So these days it’s complicated. Pictures should be a picture, should be a picture in theory. But from a tech standpoint, there’s all these different formats, and there’s these different aspects to it. I generally have my clients, I try to get them to compress images before they upload. But there are also services that will run in the background and compress images. But if it’s done automatically, there’s nobody there to see it. If an image is compressed on a server, but there’s nobody there to see it, did it really happen?

But realistically, you know, you’d rather have somebody compress it locally, verify that it looks good before uploading it, and then WordPress might resize it anyway, which might undo some of the compression and on, and on, and on.

[00:14:20] Nathan Wrigley: I think WordPress has taken quite a few interesting steps in terms of images in the more recent past. I couldn’t point to the exact version number, not off the top of my head, or the date and month when it happened, but in the more recent past, WordPress has taken the initiative in cropping, for want of a better word, the file size of an image.

So if you upload some gigantic image and you haven’t in some way fiddled with your WordPress website, it’s now going to scale that back to, I think it’s something like two and half thousand pixels wide by whatever the dimensions would be for its height.

[00:14:50] Corey Maass: Which is sensible.

[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean most people looking at that, even on a large monitor, it would still be pretty acceptable. But the idea would be cut out waste. Delete the original one which has no purpose sort of living anywhere, because it’s never going to be displayed.

But also, WordPress in this version that just got released, so 6.7 just the other day, is starting to convert HEIC images, which you mentioned, which I believe is an Apple format.

[00:15:15] Corey Maass: High efficiency image file format.

[00:15:18] Nathan Wrigley: The idea being that an iPhone creates these, and if you are in the Apple ecosystem, and you view everything on Apple products, you would never know that that was a quirky image format that not everything can view.

[00:15:29] Corey Maass: Until you try to upload it to various platforms.

[00:15:31] Nathan Wrigley: Right, and until 6.7 in WordPress, if you tried to upload it to WordPress, it would do nothing. Now, because it’s non-viewable in most browsers.

[00:15:40] Corey Maass: Safari only.

[00:15:41] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was going to say, I expect that Safari would be the one that it would be available on, given that it’s Apple’s own browser. WordPress will now do a conversion on the fly and turn it into an equivalent JPEG, without you having to think.

If I was to talk to a non-technical user, so just walk down the street, find some random user of the internet, but has no history with web development and just ask them, what’s a PNG? What’s a jpeg? What’s an HEIC? I don’t know. No idea, and I don’t care. Do you like looking at pictures online? Yes. Do you know what image format it is? No. And they don’t want to know.

And it is the kind of technology which you hope would go away. You know, you don’t really want to, in a WordPress website, care about any of this. You just want it all to work. But I suppose the stumbling block is the browser support. If, for example, WebP is non-visible, I don’t know, I’m guessing here, in Firefox, then that’s a problem and you have to fall back to previous defaults that will work like JPEG. So it’s an interesting time that we live in.

[00:16:34] Corey Maass: We’ve gone through this before. I remember when PNG came out and you had to have a fallback from JPEG to PNG. The oscillations will lessen. There’s a less nerdy way to say that. It’ll smooth itself out in the end.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right. To me it’s analogous to people who are growing up with the internet now, often don’t know what a file is, because they’re just used to working in the cloud, right? So open a document, ie, click on a link so that you’re viewing it. But there’s no sense of putting it somewhere on your hard drive, and then having an index that points to it kind of thing, right? It’s just a list of files, and you click on them, and everything in the browser.

And frankly, that’s how it should be. There’s reasons to download files for backup purposes and to not have Google own everything that you do. Not that they don’t already have a copy. But aside from that, we’d like it to be, and most of the internet works just fine in that you can take a picture, upload it to Instagram, regardless of what kind of device you’re on, and show it to the world. And that’s kind of how we want the internet to work. But yeah, from a technical standpoint, in the background there are all these little levers and gears that need to run.

[00:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s interesting. If you look on an iPhone, typically, if you take a picture it just goes into, let’s call it the camera roll. And the camera roll just feels like a bucket. It’s not a file system, is it? It’s just, you open the photos app, look there, they all are, and they’re organised by date. But there’s no notion that that is a file. Look, it’s the picture, there’s the picture.

And I think to some extent we’ve got the same thing in WordPress, haven’t you? With the Media Library. It’s just, well, where are your pictures? Well, they’re in that thing there. It’s called the Media Library, and you click on it with no conception that there’s a whole stack of different things going on in the background to upload them into files on a server somewhere, which are organized possibly by date or what have you. And it’s all going on in background, but nobody wants to know for a good reason.

[00:18:24] Corey Maass: WordPress natively puts your images in a year, and then month directory, but that’s not represented in the Media Library, which is just confounding. You never stop seeing requests on Reddit, or Twitter, or wherever, and even a client came to me recently and was like, can we have folders in the Media Library?

And I’m like, there are a couple of plugins, and I’ve tried them over the years with degrees of success, I’m sure they’ve ironed out the wrinkles at this point. When I tried them five years ago when I was like, I really want directories, I found that they bogged the site down because they were constantly running in the background. I’m sure, again, most tech has been updated, but bugs have been fixed.

But it’s a dump, right? And so you hope that, in this day and age, yet another compelling reason like, please, anybody who ever uploads an image, give it a good alt tag for all the right reasons. But if you’re selfish, if nothing else, the fringe benefit is that the words and the alt tag are what are going to let you search for your images. Also give it a caption, also give it a title.

But all of these things are how you’re going to find images. Otherwise, like one of my primary client websites is a magazine that’s been online for 12 years. There’s 12, literally 12,000 posts, and tens of thousands of images. And so trying to find something from last year, you just can’t. You’re just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Skimming, skimming, skimming, and dumb luck if your eye happens to fall on the right image at the right time. Like, there’s just no coming back from that basically. Like you said, it’s just one big camera roll.

[00:19:58] Nathan Wrigley: It would be kind of nice, and I think that there’s initiatives to really wrangle the Media Library into something a little bit more akin to something usable for the edge cases that you described. But it’s the 80 20 rule in WordPress, isn’t it? You know, if 80% of the people need it, then it will be put into Core.

[00:20:17] Corey Maass: And there are, again, a couple of great plugins for adding essentially virtual, but it feels real, directories. The problem is, right, you have to, essentially it’s the same as tagging posts. And so you really want to have started that at the beginning. I pulled this site over from, it was a Drupal. I wound up migrating this site over from Drupal with, again, 12,000 posts, and tens of thousands of images, damage done.

We could start putting images in directories now, not actually a bad thing, but we’re relying largely on tags, on descriptions on recent, the fact that they float to the top essentially. Because it ends up adding more complexity. Like there’s definitely a lot of use cases for having media directories. I would really love a directory, or a folder, a virtual folder that has logos and other assets like that in it, so that you always know where to go grab the right logo, formatted correctly. Maybe it’s got a transparent background or not. Black on white, white on black, these kinds of things.

But all of the images that go with posts, given that we publish half a dozen every day, those images are going to end up going down, down, down anyway. How would you categorise them other than month and day, which hopefully we could pick up from the actual directories that they’re in on the server kind of thing.

[00:21:41] Nathan Wrigley: It’d be kind of interesting in the future to see if AI could do a job of backfilling. As an example, here are all the images of cats in your WordPress website. Here’s every image that’s got some background transparency in it. Here are things which we suspect might be logos, here’s everything with blue in it, and you get the idea. And in that way, the AI could probably backfill it.

But you’re right, I would basically want something a bit like the options that you have in the Finder or Windows Explorer inside the Media Library. So the option to, I don’t know, zoom in so that the icons become really large. If I pull some kind of slider left and right I can increase the size, decrease the size. I can put them in a list view. I can see by folder structure, that would be really great.

But obviously for historical reasons, that’s not what WordPress did. And we’ve got stuck with the legacy of it. But like I say, the work is being done to modify that, and we’ll have to see as 2025 rolls along, not the theme, the year. We’ll see if any of that has an impact, I think it will.

The other thing to say is that there’s some interesting work going on with technologies like WebAssembly to do a lot of interesting things within the browser. So I will link in the show notes to some videos that I saw probably six months ago, maybe more now, by a Googler who’s in the WordPress space called Pascal Birchler. And he has been working on blocks which consume, for example, let’s say a JPEG. You drag a JPEG in from your computer. Drag it onto the block editor. The block editor will then recognise that that’s an image. But you would tell that block, okay, every time a JPEG is put up, please convert it into a PNG, for example, or whatever you like, and make it this dimension. So crop it in this way, in that way.

And all of that is happening kind of interestingly, not by sending it off to some server somewhere, which is what typically happens now, but it’s happening inside the browser. The browser and your local computer are doing all the necessary grunt work to make that happen. And it happens right in front of your eyes in a heartbeat. So by the time you’ve dragged it in and it’s taken, you know, a few milliseconds really to display it on the screen, it’s all happened. And you are now looking at the result of that.

And he’s also been working on video in the same way, you know, cropping video, and minimising the footprint of video, and what have you. It’s really interesting work. An easier time of it in the future with images, and videos, and things like that, and the browser handling a lot of the heavy lifting.

[00:24:03] Corey Maass: This is the modern web. There’s so much that JavaScript can now do, and it’s been moved a little bit to the server side, or it can be moved to the server side, which I think in part is what has empowered it to become more powerful in the front end browser.

So as you and I are sitting here chatting, we are looking at each other and recording this, and a lot of this is just going to be in browser functionality. It’s not necessarily relying on some connection to some server. You hope it does, so that if my computer shuts down, I don’t lose everything.

But this is what allows a lot of the web apps that we’re now seeing to function, including my own OMGIMG plugin is image rendering in the browser. It’s incredibly powerful, it’s not totally foolproof, but it gives you most of the options for most of the things that you need. And I’m seeing, recently I was looking at a library that was using React, which is essentially a framework for JavaScript, that would let you build or design, and then render out videos.

And so I was specifically looking at it for a new webpage that I’m building, I want to have an explainer, so-called explainer video at the top. Click on this to see a demo of the product kind of thing. And rather than trying to capture footage of a screencast of me clicking around, and then dragging that into iMovie or something, and editing it all together. Actually using JavaScript to programmatically say, grab these frames, or grab this screenshot. Put them together in such and such a way, click a button, and then it’ll download an MP4 that I can do whatever with.

And all of it in the browser. That’s the backend, and then there’s front end products. Like I know that Canva, incredibly powerful browser editor. Also like you said, WebAssembly. And so it’s JavaScript and good product development combined with these very, very powerful in browser capabilities that we have now, libraries. There’s so much we can do, and again, so much less of it relies on external services or the server.

That was actually one of the things that, when Corey and I first came up with the idea for OMG, I had already built an external service for taking screenshots. And then when I went back and looked at it, I was like, wait, I can just do this in the browser. Like I don’t actually have to talk to a third party. And it was one of the initial differentiators and still maybe, I think it is still. So compared to the few other products that do similar things, most of them rely on talking to a third party product, or talking to the backend, and OMG is entirely in the browser.

So there’s fewer concerns about tech requirements. There’s fewer concerns about privacy. There’s fewer concerns about bandwidth or whatever. Like WordPress wants to be self-contained. That’s one of the things that’s always been great about it, and why I’ve long advocated for, if you have a WordPress install, turn it into whatever you want it to be.

You know, use it to run your business, let it do product management, or let it be your to-do list, or all these things, because it’s essentially an operating system and you can run software within that operating system and you control it all.

And so with that ethos in mind, here’s a way that you can generate images, manipulate images, or as the example you brought up, also video. But imagine doing all of that built right into a thing that you own safely on the internet, you’re not reliant on third party products or whatnot. You just have to have a modern enough computer, and probably a browser like Chrome.

[00:27:38] Nathan Wrigley: I do remember when Google first launched their Chromebook initiative, and I remember thinking, what’s the point of that? You know, it’s got no memory, as in storage, why would anybody want that? And as time has crept on, we’re probably a decade or more into that project, I kind of see the utility of it more and more. I mean, in my case, I’d still want some of the power that the operating system that I prefer has. So for example, doing audio editing, you’ll know about that, and video editing. There’s just so much that needs a bit of horsepower.

But for a typical user, I think we are reaching the point where the browser can do the vast majority of what you want it to do. And WordPress can be the fulcrum of that. I mean, it won’t do everything unless somebody builds a credible plugin for it.

But your example is perfect. So we are recording on an online platform at the moment. We’re both in a browser. We’re watching the video. It’s recording the audio. It’s sending that data synchronously to some server somewhere so that there’s a backup if we get cut off. It can have up to 10 people doing the same thing at the same time.

I’ve got a similar piece of software, which will then allow me to edit the video in real time, again, all in the browser. And really, if you weren’t technical, and you were to look at it, you would imagine that it was some app that I downloaded from the Mac App Store or what have you. But it’s not, it’s just sitting inside the browser, and it is pretty remarkable.

I think the future in terms of what blocks will bring, and the fact that blocks can be sometimes like a little atomised app if you like. You know, it can handle app-like functionality within it, I think it’s going to be curious what people do in the future.

So let’s just turn our attention to your plugin then. First of all, the URL omgimg.co, so .co, go and find that. Is this an endeavor to get people to go the last mile? You know that final thing that you’ve got to do every time you write a blog post, which is the featured image. And it’s the last thing that you want to do at that moment because you’ve already spent hours creating and crafting the text.

And you’re finally hit with that, oh really? And then you’ve got to go and open up Canva or Photoshop and spend time doing something that you probably don’t have the skillset to do. Have I kind of got the idea there? It’s just a dead easy drop in for, here’s a templated way of doing it, click some buttons, you’re off to the races.

[00:29:57] Corey Maass: Yeah. That was the problem that we originally were looking at solving. You’re, generating content, you’re writing long blog posts, or short blog posts, up to you. Or even uploading products into WooCommerce, or whatever it is that you are using WordPress for.

But if it’s a thing that’s going to be shared, there is this social image. And there’s this misconception that a lot of people have, which is that the featured image is also the social image. And it’s true because it can be true, but it doesn’t have to be true. And you’re honestly doing yourself a disservice by not differentiating these two things.

A lot of SEO plugins very correctly will try their best, they will go and grab the featured image, or the first image that they find inside the content of whatever post you’ve published, and serve that up, and if not, they will default to a, probably a site-wide image that you’ve uploaded.

But the idea here is yeah, the hard work, and what we’ve experienced, and I think a lot of people experience is not necessarily, I mean, it’s hard enough writing words. If you’re writing blog posts, it’s hard enough writing words, or if you’ve recorded a podcast episode and you’ve uploaded it, you’ve spent hours, and hours, and hours editing it.

And then you groan because you pull up your reusable to-do list and go, okay, now what are all the things I’ve got to do? Now I’ve got to categorise it. Now I’ve got to tag it. Now I’ve got to grab a transcript. Now I’ve got to find a featured image. Now I’ve got to upload the featured image.

[00:31:26] Nathan Wrigley: You’ve just described my life, Corey.

[00:31:28] Corey Maass: And I want to give you a hug. And that’s the good and bad of what we do, right? We want to be the rockstar millionaire or whatever, who is like, I’ve appeared on camera, and now I walk away, and all the talent, you know, all my underlings can go and do all the other work. But most of us are independent on some level, and subsequently are trapped to a desk doing most of the hard work ourselves. The boring work, the grinding, right?

And one of those things, as we found, was finding a stock photo is sort of a different thing because it kind of depends on what it is you’re doing. Most people kind of have a source for that. But there’s a really strong argument for a featured image that is edited. Meaning it’s got words on it. It’s got a logo on it. It’s color edited so that it matches your branding, your site. Because just uploading the first picture that you find on Unsplash, just like everybody else, is not going to do your content any good.

Like a lot of people correctly believe that adding a photo does lead to more conversions, but just adding some stock photo isn’t the right answer. So taking that a step further, making that image good, cropping it to the right size, enhancing it essentially. And then the next thing would be the image for social, which is often based off of that featured image.

But we found last year that Twitter actually got rid of the title. If you share a website, it used to have the social image, and then it used to have the title of the website, and a description, and the URL, like Facebook still has this, LinkedIn still has this, Slack and other services that’ll pull in this preview still have it.

Twitter got rid of it because they were like, most people, they’re just lying, or they’re just adding crappy content, and or some wanting to be more like Instagram. They’re like, we are photo only. And so you need something more than just an image because just an image, it’s a picture of Nathan’s smiling face, it’s like, I might click on it, I might not click on it.

For those of you listening, because we are not on video, he just smiled ear to ear. Hamming it up as usual in the background. People go, oh, it’s Nathan, but why? I don’t know what he’s promoting. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I don’t know why he’s, maybe he’s just happy today. You need a title that says, Nathan Interviews genius developer named Corey. You know, words on an image so that people go, oh, this is why I should click on this. It’s a small thing, but it’s a very powerful thing. And this is largely the problem I’m solving.

[00:33:53] Nathan Wrigley: I remember speaking recently with Jamie Marsland, he’s an Automattician, so he’s employed by Automattic, and his job title is the head of WordPress YouTube, and so he’s in charge of that channel. And I know that I could have found this information out elsewhere, but he really was the first person who’d kind of described it to me.

He spent a long time researching images that would be the thumbnail image on YouTube because the attention span on YouTube, I think is prodigious low. You really are competing in a marketplace of milliseconds. And if for a fleeting moment you manage to get your featured image in front of somebody, you’ve got to convert it almost immediately.

And so there’s kind of a playbook if you like, and I haven’t yet talked to Jamie about what that playbook is, but he does say that he spends a lot of time playing with the featured image, just because he knows now what works, and what converts, and what doesn’t. And it may not be that he’s got it perfected, and I imagine that algorithm over time will change or what have you. But there is some kind of psychology behind what’s going to work, and the kind of text to put on there, and whether it’s a, I don’t know, a question, or what the kind of font is.

And we see patterns, don’t we? We see popular ways of doing it. So for the longest time, we’ve seen, on YouTube videos, featured images, we’ve seen shocked looking people with a background, and they’ve got like a little white border around their cut out picture of themselves and so on. And everybody’s doing it. And if everybody’s doing it, there’s probably something effective about that. You know, not everybody can be doing it if it doesn’t work.

[00:35:20] Corey Maass: Look at movie posters. That was how it was explained to me first. All these movie posters for most movies these days look the same. It’s a montage of all the characters in kind of a pyramid, in a triangle with the title at the bottom, right? Like, there’s a reason why it sells. And at some point, I mean, just like any advertising or any trends in advertising, we eventually become immune to it, and so it probably has to change.

But yeah, the YouTube thumbnails, another perfect example, and actually something that I’m starting to look at for OMG as well, which is essentially generating a media kit. So it’s like, if you create a post, also create a square image for Instagram, and also create a thumbnail for YouTube.

But yeah, there’s an immense amount of psychology that goes into this stuff. And a lot of it is just, also as you said, what people have gotten used to. But it also, there’s at least some element of AB testing, or experimenting for your own audience, because kids on YouTube are going to react differently, or click on different things than developers, or techy people, or WordPress people.

And then, yeah, do you look shocked? What word do you put over your head? Do you put question marks? Is it a question that people want answered? Is it you looking satisfied because you’ve figured something out? You have to figure out how to take the content that is in that video and then convey that in one compelling image.

And I’ve heard from a lot of the YouTube folks that they record their content and then spend the next five minutes striking various poses. It looks like they’re voguing. They’ve got to look shocked, and they’ve got to look angry, and they’ve got to look frustrated. And then later they go back through and go, well, maybe this one, this one I’m squinting. Okay, not that one. But yeah, this is the one, you know? And a lot, a lot of time gets spent on those thumbnails because it’s the poster for your movie.

[00:37:07] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the workflow for OMGIMG then? If I’m in a WordPress, let’s say a blog post, let’s use that example, and I’ve written it out, I’m very happy with it, in every way I’m ready to go. I’ve got my SEO settings all done, and the text is ready and optimised and what have you. But the only thing that’s missing is some kind of imagery. How does it work? Do I click a button and then I’m interacting with some kind of editor that you provide? What’s going on?

[00:37:29] Corey Maass: The big update that I made earlier this year was shifting from essentially a Canva style editor in WordPress, which still exists, but you now use that predominantly to create a template. So you’re like, I want the featured image in the background. I want the title of my post in the lower left, and I want my logo in the top right, and a border or something.

And you save that as a template, and so now as part of your workflow, you finish writing, you fill out all the SEO fields, and then there’s a little button, an OMG meta box off to the side, and you click generate, and it opens a little window and you choose the preset, the template that you want to use. It creates the image in three seconds or less, and you hit save and you’re done.

[00:38:12] Nathan Wrigley: Do you at that point get to, I don’t know, overwrite the texts, or write the title, or does it just consume the title from the blog post?

[00:38:19] Corey Maass: It just consumes the content right now. I am adding, it has been requested that, oh, well for this, maybe I want to tweak the featured image slightly, or I want to take a word out of the title because it’s too long for the template that I built, kind of thing. So that’s coming soon, to be able to tweak those things slightly.

What I’ve heard from most of my customers, users, is that what they care the most about is, again, abbreviating that workflow. And so there’s a little bit of tweaking or making it perfect, but for the most part, people are like, just make it fast. Just take this line item off of my to-do list so that if I finish writing a blog post, and then I’ve finished adding all of the SEO things, and then I’ve finished finding the perfect featured image, and then I’ve finished categorising it. Don’t make me open Canva, find the document, copy a page, copy the post title over, blah, blah, blah. You get the point.

And so they’re willing to have essentially that mini version. And obviously, again, I want people to be able to make it perfect, but what I’ve been hearing more than make it perfect is make it fast. And so that’s what I’m focused on.

[00:39:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, have you come across a SaaS app called RelayThat? RelayThat’s a really interesting example because its prime purpose is to, much like you’ve just described, you create a template, and then you decide where the text is going to go. And once you’ve got that template, you have basically a bunch of text fields, and you just go and copy and paste the text in.

So in your case, you could handle that natively. But you copy and paste the title in. You copy and paste, you know, in my case there might be a space here for the guest name or something like that. You might upload a featured image. In this case it would be, I’d copy and paste your name, copy and paste an image of you that you’d sent to me, and do the title. And so I’ve had to amend three fields, and then I can download it.

But the interesting thing that it does as well is that it will create that exact image in just every size format. So it will do it for Instagram, for YouTube, all the different ones. And it’s optimised in that way. And obviously you can go in and set each one.

And it’s a real pain the first time you use it, you know, it really genuinely takes hours to get everything just how you want it and figure it all out. But then on the back end of that, it’s seconds to do, but you’ve got to open up an app, log in, dah, dah, dah, dah. Whereas I can see the utility, if you’re inside WordPress and it can do all of those kind of things. That was the closest comparison I could draw. It’s definitely worth looking at if you’ve not come across that before.

[00:40:52] Corey Maass: In my research for OMG, I’ve seen different apps, and also other apps that work similarly for generating banners, or generating social images, or generating whatnot. And this is part of what gave me confidence that this was a problem worth solving, because almost everybody has bought into something because it’s necessary.

In this day and age, most of us want our web pages shared, right? The day of people just coming to your website over, and over, and over again, hoping that there’s new content is largely over. Unless you’re the New York Times or something. Unless you’re a destination.

Most of the internet now is based around aggregation, which is Twitter or Facebook. And so people go to these single sources where they’re hoping that everybody has kind of dumped their stuff in, or other people have dumped other people’s stuff in. And that’s how we can consume it all in one feed. Very convenient.

But this is why it’s more and more important that how you are represented on those platforms, often without knowing about it. And this is one of the things that I struggled early on to explain to, like I gave a talk about images, and open graph, and all this stuff to a meetup here in New Hampshire. And it was eye-opening because trying to explain the importance of this, and the scenario of, it’s not even about you sharing your website, it’s about Nathan sharing my website with Michelle without me knowing, right?

And so it’s how I am represented without me being present. And so I need to set myself up for success for that scenario. And because it’s that third party validation is the biggest, still the most compelling sales technique, right? There’s a reason why all of us have testimonials on our landing pages. Somebody else telling somebody else about how great I am is way better than me telling them how great I am. And this is that same thing. Nathan sharing my website with somebody else is way more compelling to that other person.

They’re going, well, I trust Nathan, smart. He’s got that fancy accent, so he must know what he’s talking about. And it lends authenticity, it lends value to whatever he’s sharing. And so if he shares that link and then a little gray box pops up. I was talking to somebody this week, they were like, yeah, I always assume that that’s spam. And I was like, wow, that’s really, really powerful, that people go, I’m really hesitant to click on this thing because it’s a gray box.

And it’s the same as 25 years ago, 30 years ago, now when I first started. It was the first wave of, you are not a legitimate business if you do not have a website. And this was a compelling way for when I started my career to get clients, because I could go in and go, look, people are not taking you seriously because you don’t have a website. But it’s all these little boxes that you have to tick to represent yourself the best you can on the internet.

[00:43:42] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s totally true. I mean, we’re all, whether we like it or not, we are all in some way shape or form involved in social media. If you’re a business and you’re not on social media, and you remain in business, well, you’re very lucky. Most of the rest of us have to do that job.

And you are right, if you see something and there isn’t some kind of featured image attached, you do have that little spidey sense, well, that’s kind of curious and strange, that doesn’t quite look legitimate.

And the ability to speed it up inside of WordPress natively is fascinating. And let’s not forget that the majority of people who are using WordPress are not the likes of you and I, who have been obsessed with computers ever since, you know, they came around. These are people who, they’re using WordPress in some kind of utilitarian way that, you know, they’ve been handed the job of creating blog posts, and the faster that they can get in and get out and do the other 3000 tasks that they’ve got on their plate this week, the better.

And so, yeah, it’s an exciting time with all the technologies that are happening inside of the browser, WebAssembly and so on, but also the technologies that people like you are building inside a WordPress. Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Corey, where can we find you? If people have listened to this and they’re curious to get in touch and talk to you about images, where do we find you best?

[00:44:50] Corey Maass: Sure. Corey Maass, M A A S S on Twitter is where I’m most active. My company is called Gel Form, gelform.com, and of course omgimg.co.

[00:45:04] Nathan Wrigley: Cory Maass, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:45:07] Corey Maass: Thanks for having me.

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