Buffer has become a staple of many social media managers lives. The ability to schedule messages for their optimum times and not have to rely on a timer to send a social media update when you want is key for many people to make sure they can reach people most effectively while still maintaining some form of work/life balance.
For a long time, Buffer has talked about how important images and graphics are for effective social media updates and the benefits they can provide in terms of click throughs and resharing. It was no wonder they created the Pablo tool to help people quickly create social media graphics to share with their content.
Well now Pablo has evolved into Pablo 2 and it’s definitely worth checking out.
What’s Good
If you never tried the original Pablo, it was a simple tool that allow you to add a couple of elements of text over an image with some very basic editing and then send it to buffer to be shared or they could be downloaded. Pablo provided suggested quotes as well as images from Creative Commons Zero sources (mostly Unsplash, yes images from Unsplash again) as well as the option to upload images. Finally Pablo had the ability to increase the contrast (so the text stood out more). Very basic but very useful, especially as it could be much quicker to use than a tool like Photoshop.
Now Pablo 2 has added on to those original features which are all still present. You can now create tall Pinterest style graphics as well as square Instagram graphics and still have the traditional wider Facebook and twitter graphics. Best of all, you can quickly change between all three and download or schedule all of them with a couple of clicks of a button.
Pablo 2 has also added some more editing options including the option to blur your image or change it to black and white. Plus you can also upload a custom logo to add some of your own branding to an image. Oh, and it’s still free to use.
What’s Bad
Pablo’s greatest strength is still it’s weakness. It’s a very simple tool. You can’t add fancy graphics to your images, you have very limited choices of free images all of which are “hipster chic” Creative common zero photos (unless you upload your own), you have no fine tune editing control for the contrast, blur or black and white filter settings, you can merely turn them on or off and you only have three image sizes or settings.
It’s great for some simple and basic social media updates or quote graphics, but it’s not going to replace your whole graphics team.
Alternatives
Canva (for Work)
Canva for Work is probably the most similar in terms of tools and ideas. Its magic resize tool is very similar to the quick re-sizing in Pablo, however it isn’t as fast. Plus you might have to tweak around with text position more in Canva. However, Canva features many more tools for editing images which can help you create much more branded and well designed graphics, not just for social media but for slides, emails, leaflets and presentations too.
Canva is free (as long as you don’t use their premium graphics), but to get the magic resize tool, you’ll have to pay a bit of money.
Photoshop or Similar Desktop Editor
Photoshop or another pro editing tool is an alternative and you can set up some Photoshop scrips to “magical resize” your graphics and save you some time. However, the price and skills necessary to use it are much higher.
Wordswag
Wordswag is a good tool for people with no design sense (raises hand slowly) who want to make quick graphics. Like Pablo, it has a free image search tool (using pixel bay) and can suggest quotes to share. It can also add a logo (like Pablo) and has guidelines to crop for different social networks. Unlike Pablo though, it has some different font styles and layouts that look a lot more professional than the simple fonts of Pablo.
It is an iOS only app however.
Over
Over has just launched it’s third update. It’s a mobile app like WordSwag, but is on both iOS and Android (we’ve not forgotten about you Android guys!). Over has more control over the placement of text and has additional artwork which you can purchase via in app purchases. The latest version also includes some great new features (also unlockable by in app purchase) such as Unsplash image search, pixalbay image search, masking text (making some parts disappear) and more.
Over takes more time than WordSwag or Pablo to create a great image but you can really customize and image in a way you could never do in Pablo.
Summary
Pablo 2 is a nice evolution from the original Pablo and a tool that can help you make quick, easy and simple shareable graphics. It’s not perfect and won’t look as good as some other tools, but it is great when you need something simple.
– Design (4)
– Features (3)
– Performance (5)
– Value (4)
Head over to Pablo and check it out today.
Greg says
Cool stuff. Now you’ve got me trying Canva. I also use pixteller. It does similar stuff as Canva – maybe a little more granular in options.
Eric Dye says
So fancy. 😛
Meredith Gould says
Check out Snappa. More functionality than Pablo and less complex than Canva. It’s great for quick things like topic images to accompany Twitter-based chats.
Chris Wilson says
thanks for the recommendation Meredith, I will check it out. I think Pablo’s big advantage is it is built into Buffer and can be accessed as you share from a page, but I can imagine a tool like snappa could appeal to many. I’ll check it out.