How to automate daily TikTok slideshows without building your own AI pipeline

Slideshows are eating TikTok's "For You" feed. Photo-mode carousels get video-level distribution with a fraction of the production cost — no editing, no UGC actor, no music sync. You need 5 images, a hook, and a caption.

That's also why everyone tried to automate it this year. The stack people keep landing on looks like this:

• Codex or a long-context LLM to reverse-engineer the structure of viral slideshows into reusable format schemas.
• An image model (Images 2.0, Midjourney, Flux) for the anchor slide.
• A Pinterest scraping library for the middle slides — cheaper than generating, often prettier.
• A Node.js compositor (sharp + @napi-rs/canvas) to bake the hook text onto each image with a readable stroke and gradient.
• A queue (BullMQ + Redis), a self-hosted scheduler (Postiz), and the TikTok Content Posting API for distribution.

We tried this. It works. But maintaining six moving parts so you can post a slideshow every day is a full-time side project. Most creators bail after a weekend of debugging font fallbacks on Vietnamese diacritics.

This post is the honest version of that workflow — the parts that are worth your time, the parts Swaply collapses, and the parts you still own yourself.

What's actually hard in the pipeline

Two things. Everything else is plumbing.

Character consistency across slides. A slideshow reads as one piece of content only if the same "person" shows up in every frame. Base image models don't do this. You need a reference- image workflow: generate slide one, then condition slides 2–5 on it so the face, body, age, and outfit carry through. Most DIY pipelines fake this with Pinterest and hope nobody notices the character shifting every slide.

Text baked into the image at the right aesthetic. Overlaying text with CSS is fine for the web, but TikTok compresses captions and crops differently across devices. You want the hook rendered into the JPEG — bold, with a stroke, placed so it survives the safe-area crop. This is where most DIY workflows die. Canvas rendering with multi-language fonts, word-wrap, and stroke-before-fill compositing is a week of edge cases.

What Swaply Slideshows actually does

Swaply's Slideshows feature collapses the two hard parts into one URL paste. You give it a landing page, a blog post, a product page — anything with a premise — and it returns a complete 5-slide carousel with captions and hashtags.

Under the hood it does three things in sequence:

1. Claude reads the URL and plans the carousel: a consistent character description, a hook per slide, scene directions, a post caption, and hashtags.
2. Flux Pro Ultra renders slide one as the anchor. This is the image that defines the character.
3. Nano Banana renders slides 2–5 in edit mode, using slide one as the reference image. Same face, same outfit, new scene per slide.

Output is five 4:5 portrait JPEGs with the hook text baked in, plus a ready-to-paste caption and hashtag set. If you want TikTok photo mode specifically, there's a one-click 15-second MP4 export at 1080×1350 that stitches the slides into a vertical video with the same hooks rendered server-side.

The daily workflow

This is what a realistic cadence looks like. We're not pretending you're going to post 30 slideshows a day — that road ends in shadowbans and burned accounts. One high-signal slideshow per day, per account, is where the algorithm rewards you.

Step 1 — Build a URL library, not a prompt library

The unlock most people miss: you don't need to write prompts. You need a running list of URLs that Claude can turn into hooks. Anything with a strong premise works:

• Competitor landing pages in your niche.
• High-performing blog posts (yours or someone else's).
• Wikipedia pages on niche topics — goldmine for "did you know" formats.
• Reddit threads with strong opinions — copy the URL, let Claude extract the premise.
• Product Hunt launches, Hacker News front page, niche news sites.

Keep it in a Notion table or a Google Sheet. 20–30 URLs is a month's worth of slideshows.

Step 2 — Batch on Sunday, post daily

Pick 5–7 URLs from the library every Sunday. Paste them into Slideshows one at a time. Generation takes a couple of minutes per carousel. You end the session with a week of content in a downloads folder.

Review each slideshow before posting. The Claude-planned hooks are good, but you know your audience — rewrite any slide that feels off. You can't edit the image directly inside Swaply, but you can regenerate a slideshow for 2 ad credits if the direction is wrong.

Step 3 — Post manually or with a scheduler

Swaply doesn't post for you, and that's intentional. Automated posting at the API level is where TikTok accounts get flagged. Download the JPEGs (or the 15-second MP4), drop them into the native TikTok or Instagram app, write your caption, post.

If you want scheduling without the ban risk, a self-hosted Postiz instance plus the official TikTok Content Posting API is the cleanest option. You still download Swaply's output, upload it to Postiz, and let Postiz handle the calendar. You keep the image quality; Postiz keeps your accounts safe.

The honest limits

Things Swaply doesn't do, so you can plan around them:

• No public API. Slideshows is a web UI. If you want a Zapier-style pipeline, you'll still do the paste yourself. This is on the roadmap.
• One format per URL. Claude picks a structure based on the input. You get format variety by varying your URLs, not by choosing a template.
• Credits, not unlimited. Each slideshow costs 2 ad credits. Video export is 1 more. The Ultra plan ($164.99/mo) gives you 50 ad credits — enough for roughly 20–25 slideshows a month, or ~15 with video export. Max ($98.99/mo) is 20 ad credits, which is a solid twice-a-week cadence.
• No posting, no account management. You still handle distribution. This is deliberate. The moment a third-party tool posts for you, you're one ToS change away from losing accounts.

When to still build your own

Swaply is the right tool if your goal is consistent daily output for one brand or a small portfolio of accounts. If you're running 50+ accounts, need programmatic format A/B testing, or have a specific aesthetic that needs fine-tuned models — build the pipeline. The example stack at the top of this post is a real blueprint, and Codex will happily scaffold it.

For everyone else: paste URL, get carousel, post, repeat. The boring workflow is the one that compounds.