A marketing team that promotes 40 products, 12 webinars or 30 course dates can end up remaking the same image dozens of times. Each time, the team changes only the details: a price, a date, a city or a name.
With spreadsheet-driven image generation, you design the layout once as a template, then fill it from a spreadsheet with one row per image. You keep the branding fixed and edit only the details.
What is spreadsheet-driven image generation?
Spreadsheet-driven image generation is a way to create many images from one design template. You add one row per image to a spreadsheet. Then you map each column to a template field, such as a headline, price, date or photo.
You give each field in the template a fixed position, font and size. You pull your logo, colours and fonts from a shared brand kit, so a designer approves the layout once. After that, anyone on the team can produce new images by adding rows.
You can also generate several sizes from the same row. From a single product row, you can create a 1080 x 1080 social post, a 300 x 600 display banner and an email header. Set up a template for each size first. Pixelixe, for example, can generate images from spreadsheet rows.
How to set up a spreadsheet for image generation
Name each column after a template field, keep one image per row and test a few rows before you run the full batch.
- Add a header row with one column per field, such as headline, subheading, price, date, image_url and button_text.
- Enter one value per cell. Split text you might style differently, such as a price and a currency symbol, into separate columns.
- Use public https links for photos, and open a few of them to check that they load.
- Set a character limit for each text column based on the space in the template. For example, if you have room for 40 characters in the headline, cap that column at 40.
- Write dates and prices exactly as they should appear, such as “14 Nov 2026” or “€49”.
- Save the file as a UTF-8 CSV if you export it, so names such as Malmö and Łódź keep their special letters.
- Generate three to five test rows, check them and then run the rest.
Workflow 1: Promo images from a product feed
Online shops generate one promo image per product from a feed with the product name, regular price, sale price and photo.
Say a shop puts 200 products on sale for Black Friday. The team adds a sale_price column and a badge column, such as “-30%”, to the product feed. The team uses one template to turn each row into a social post and a display banner. When a price changes, the team updates the row and generates that image again. Pixelixe calls this product feed promo automation.
Keep the original photos for shopping feeds. Google does not allow promotional text, watermarks or logos over the main product image in Merchant Center, according to its image requirements. Google also plans to require images of at least 500 x 500 pixels for all products from 31 January 2027. Use the generated promo images for ads, social posts and email instead.
Workflow 2: Job ad visuals for roles in several countries
Recruiting teams generate one job ad visual per role and country, with the job title, city, language and pay range for each market.
A company that hires employees internationally may advertise the same software engineer role in Germany, Spain and Poland. The team builds a spreadsheet with one row per country. In each row, the team adds the local job title, city, pay range in local currency and application link. The team then generates all three visuals from one template, in the same brand style.
Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, employers must tell job applicants the starting pay or pay range, either in the job ad or before the interview. EU countries had until 7 June 2026 to bring it into national law, according to the directive’s text on EUR-Lex. Add a pay range column, so you can show the same figures on each visual as in the ad text. For more on adapting one campaign across markets, see Pixelixe’s guide to localization creative automation.
Workflow 3: Course and event banners from a session schedule
Training providers and event organisers generate one banner per session, with its title, date, city, venue and trainer or speaker.
Say a training provider runs an “Excel for Managers” course six times this autumn in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Training providers keep session dates, venues, trainers and prices in a proper TMS. The team exports the upcoming sessions, keeps only the columns used in the template and generates six banners for the website, LinkedIn and the course newsletter.
Add a status column for sessions that fill up. When a session is full, the team changes the status to “Fully booked” and generates that banner again. You can use the same approach for webinar and conference banners, which Pixelixe covers in its page on webinar and event banner automation.
Workflow 4: Personalised images for lifecycle emails
Email teams generate a personalised image for each recipient, with details such as their first name, loyalty points or next appointment.
A gym might send members a monthly email with an image showing their name and the number of classes they attended. The gym exports one row per member from its CRM and generates one image per row from the template. For larger lists, developers connect the CRM to an image personalization API, so they can refresh the images before each send.
Write alt text that a reader can follow without the image, such as “Anna, you attended 12 classes in October.” Repeat the key detail in the email text as well.
How to check generated images before you publish
Check a sample from each batch for text overflow, missing images, wrong characters and brand errors.
Sort the spreadsheet by the length of the longest text field and check the top rows first, since long values are more likely to overflow. Then check rows with special characters, rows with empty cells and a random sample of the rest.
Check colour contrast too. The W3C recommends a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal-size text in its WCAG 2.2 guidance. If you place text over photos in the template, test it with your lightest and darkest photos.
When to move from a spreadsheet to an API
Move to an API when you update the data several times a week or want to refresh images without uploading a file. Developers also use an API to let a website or app request images directly.
Developers send the same data as JSON, a text format that stores data as named fields, to an image generation endpoint. For one course banner, a developer might send:
1 | { |
Pixelixe returns the finished image, ready to place on a web page or in an email, and documents the setup for its JSON-to-image rendering endpoint. You can start with a spreadsheet, check the template on real data and switch to the API once the layout is stable.
Summary: scaling visual production with spreadsheets
Design each layout once, name your spreadsheet columns after the template fields and test a few rows before each batch. Use the same method for product promos, job ads, course banners and personalised emails. Move to an API once you update the data too often for manual uploads.
