Pexels is a website that provides free stock photos and videos that can be used for personal and commercial purposes. It has a vast library of high-quality images and videos that are contributed by various photographers and videographers from around the world. By integrating Pexels with Glide, you can spruce up your app without having to worry about copyright issues or paying for expensive stock photos.
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In Glide, click the Settings icon in the upper-right corner.
Navigate to the Integrations tab and then select Pexels.
Click the View button, and then select Add to app.
Next, log into Pexels and complete this short form to obtain an API key.
After submitting the form, your API key will be displayed.
Back in Glide, you’ll enter this key into the API Key field under your Pexels Integration settings.
Stock Photo for Text
The Stock Photo for Text action can be added to a component that supports actions (e.g., a button), added to a workflow in the Workflow Editor, or after a form is submitted.
To use the feature:
Select the component you'd like to add the action to. Remember, this must be a component that supports actions.
Search for the Stock photo for text action or navigate to Integrations -> Pexels -> Stock photo for text.
Name the action.
Choose an icon.
Specify what column Glide should use to send keywords to Pexels.
If you like, you can also specify the photographer's name and URL from Pexels.
You can retrieve small (compressed) images, large (enlarged) images, or images in their original size as a result.
You can also pull in alt text for the image and let Glide know where to store this data.
Use Cases
The integration between Pexels and Glide offers a simple way to incorporate high-quality stock photos into your app. Here are a few scenarios of how you could use Pexels in your app:
Event Banners: Elevate your event promotion using captivating images that capture the essence of the event and attract attendees.
Marketing Campaigns: Use Pexels images to enhance your marketing campaigns with professional and eye-catching visuals.
Product Listings: Take your product presentations up a notch by integrating striking images from Pexels that highlight satisfied customers.
Example: Enhancing Blog Post Banners
Let's consider the case of BoxSource, a prominent shipping box manufacturer. Weekly, they release an internal blog, a means to keep their company well-informed, minimizing the need for mundane meetings. Despite the valuable content, the presentation often falls flat, resulting in pages filled with monotonous text.
Recognizing the potency of visuals in boosting content engagement, they opt to give their internal blog a facelift with the assistance of the Pexels integration.
After integrating Pexels with Glide, Boxsource adds the Extract Keywords column to their Blogs table. This column takes the blog article as an input and return a list of keywords found in the provided text.
With the list of keywords for each blog post, Boxsource can now add the Stock Photo for Text column to retrieve a relevant image for each blog post. The column takes the keywords as an input and returns a photo that can be displayed with the blog.
The Results
The transformation is immediate. The once dull internal blog now showcases dynamic and relevant images, significantly enhancing the appeal of each post. HR soon reports a noticeable uptick in the number of staff interacting with the weekly updates.
To learn more generally about Integrations in Glide, including how they affect your app’s usage, check out our Introduction to Integrations.