Hey there 👋 We heard you need some help setting up Placid + n8n?

Here are all infos and a complete walkthrough to help you get your creative automation up and running. If you run into troubles and need extra support, just ask! We’re always happy to help.

What can I do with the Placid n8n integration?

You can generate images, PDFs and videos with Placid in your n8n workflow automations. In an n8n workflow, you can use data from other apps (like Airtable, Typeform, AI services etc.) and fill them into dynamic layers of Placid templates.

Add the n8n integration to your Placid project

First, set up a Placid project with an n8n integration. Create a new project in Placid, or add the integration to an existing one in the Project Settings.

Create a template

Next, you will need a template for your images, PDFs or videos. A template is a bit like cloze text: You define the basic layout, and decide which elements should be filled dynamically with content during your n8n workflows.

You can flexibly decide which type of creative you want to generate from your template later: All templates support image, PDF and video generation.

The template below could be filled with a product title, a price and an image, fetched from e-commerce services like Shopify or Magento. The product visual could also be a video! You're completely free to create custom templates that fit your data.

Dynamic Placid image template

Create templates in the Templates tab of your Placid project and customize them with our drag & drop editor to fit your project’s brand.

Tips:

  • Define meaningful layer names
  • Uncheck the option Element is dynamic in the layer settings if that layer will not contain dynamic content (e.g. your logo) to "lock" them
  • Fill your layers with meaningful defaults, because these will be the fallbacks if your n8n workflow does not send any values

Video templates

If you're designing a template for video creation, there are some additional things you should know about. You might want to read our dynamic video guide to learn more about how to set it up.

There are different ways to generate videos with your templates:

  • Fill a picture layer with a video file
  • Generate videos with layer animations (using the animation settings in the editor)
  • Fill a text or picture layer with multiple values so the video will transition through them (for example like a slideshow with multiple photos)
  • Combine clips from different templates (e.g. for intros or outros)

You can find some dynamic video examples in our guide to show you demos of these use cases.

Create a Placid n8n workflow

The n8n Placid node needs to receive data (e.g. text or images) from other apps to generate your images, videos or PDFs. Create a new workflow in n8n and decide where your data for the generated creatives will come from: From a Google sheet? From a Typeform? From Slack?

You will have to prepare an n8n node of your choice that holds your data.

Check n8n's workflow templates or integrations list to see which other apps from your stack are supported. If you need help with the workflow setup, you can also ask us for help! 💬

Install the Placid n8n community node

In n8n, go to Settings > Community Nodes. To install the Placid node, type the npm Package name n8n-nodes-placid and click Install.

Install the Placid n8n community node

Add a Placid node to your workflow

When you have your data ready to use, add a Placid node to your workflow.

The node needs to be authenticated with your Placid API key first. Add a new authentication credential and grab the key from the API Token tab in the left menu of your n8n project in Placid.

Placid n8n authentication via API token

Choose your operation

You will have to choose if you want to run Image, PDF, Video, Template or Other operations:

Image Operations

  • Create Image - Generate images from Placid templates with dynamic data
  • Get Image - Retrieve image information and download URLs
  • Delete Image - Delete generated images from your Placid account

PDF Operations

  • Create PDF - Generate PDFs from Placid templates with dynamic data
  • Get PDF - Retrieve PDF information and download URLs
  • Delete PDF - Delete generated PDFs from your Placid account

Video Operations

  • Create Video - Generate videos from Placid templates with support for multiple clips and audio
  • Get Video - Retrieve video information and download URLs
  • Delete Video - Delete generated videos from your Placid account

Template Operations

  • Create Template - Create new Placid templates
  • Get Template - Retrieve a specific template by ID
  • Get Many Templates - List all templates with optional filtering
  • Update Template - Update existing template properties
  • Delete Template - Delete templates from your Placid account

Other Operations

  • Upload Media - Upload media files to Placid storage for use in templates

In this starter guide, we will focus on the Create operations, as the use cases for the other actions are more advanced.

Generate Creatives

If you want to generate an image, PDF or video, you will first have to choose a template from the Template dropdown. Then you will have to map your input data to the template layers.

There are two configuration modes available: Simple (UI-based) or Advanced (JSON-based).

Simple Configuration

Using the Choose... button, you can add one or more layers you want to customize with data from your workflow. Choose the Layer Name from the dropdown to automatically get a list of Properties that you can customize.

Use the input data variables from your previous workflow steps to map them to the layer content or properties. You can fill text values into text layers, rating values into rating layers, images or videos into picture layers etc. There are also options to change colors or hide a layer. In a Create Video operation you can map multiple text or image values to a layer.

n8n Placid layer mapping via UI

Advanced Configuration

With the advanced configuration option, you can customize the layers via a JSON object, just like you would use the Placid REST API. Please refer to the API docs for the image, PDF and video API endpoints to see how the payload is constructed.

n8n Placid layer mapping for images via JSON

To create videos and PDFs via a JSON object, please note that you will have to include the template UUID directly in the payload. That's because you can generate videos with multiple video clips, and PDFs with multiple document pages that all use different templates.

n8n Placid layer mapping for videos via JSON

You can of course also use input data variables from previous workflow nodes within the JSON payload.

Test your workflow

Once you mapped data to the layers of your Placid template, you should already be able to test your workflow using the Test Workflow button.

The processed output of the Placid node will be an image ID / PDF ID / video ID and an image URL / PDF URL / video URL that you can use in further steps of your workflow. You can also see all of the creatives that Placid generated in the Log tabs in the left menu of your project in Placid.

Complete your workflow

Now that your creatives are generated, you just need to decide what you want to do with them in the next step(s) of your workflow – the files and file URLs will be available in your input data.

Complete your workflow with another node of your choice!

We always love to see what creative workflows our customers come up with. Don't hesitate to share with us ask for help if you are stuck!