Substack's image builder is a fun way to make your posts stand out

Just a fun little tip if you didn't know about it.

Aug 05, 2025

Fairy of the moon by Hermann Kaulbach, 1891

This morning I was listening to Pachelbel Canon in D and pecking away at comments on my last post when a thought hit me like a runaway train.

Last week I wrote about the vast number of people using AI in writing, 47% according to a Substack survey, but the post wasn’t about AI, it was about the deep love of the craft of writing and when I woke up this morning, over four hundred replies.

Just wow. You know? And here’s what struck me.

There are so many of us who love words. Just love words with a passion. We are still more than half here. Wrestling with them over and over to get them right.

And it’s so damn hard to get seen, you know?

I don’t know. Something about the music and the volume of responses hit me in the feels and I sat looking at all the hundreds of comments from people who love words like I do, wrestling posts for hours while someone with AI writes circles around us.

That’s not a criticism, it’s just a fact of being a craft writer today.

People say Notes, Notes, you need to be on Notes, but when I go there, it’s this giant stream of text snippets and restacks and “like if you have no followers” and y’all know what it’s like in there, yeah?

So I thought I’d share a cool feature Substack has in case you didn’t know about it. It’s called the “share center” and it’s a really fun way to make your posts stand out among all the restacks that look the same in the Notes feed.

First I’ll show you how it works, then I’ll share a couple of ways I plan to use it.

Somewhere in your dashboard is a list of all your published posts. I don’t know if you’re on the old or new dashboard, but mine is at Dashboard > Posts.

Once you get to the list of posts, click the 3 dots to the right of any post. Like this:

A dropdown menu will appear. Click “share as image”

There are 3 different layouts, vertical, instagram ratio and square. How fun is this?

You can use just your title and subtitle, or toggle to add preview text. On the bottom left, you can choose to use your image as a background, or solid color.

As the marketers in the crowd say — but wait, there’s more!! lol

If you click the X at the top of the image creator, to close out the image builder, you’ll see the entire “share center” where you can do even more.

There are 4 things you can do in the share center. It looks like this…

Here’s what you can do in there:

Write a text note (in your own words) that will link to a post
One click to share the post to Instagram, Facebook, X or LinkedIn.
Third option is the image builder I just showed you.
At the very bottom, you can make a super short video to highlight a post.

I wish when we created an image in image builder that Substack would automatically post it to Notes with a link, but they don’t. You have to download the image and upload to Notes. But, they’re pretty and stand out from the stream of restacks.

Two ways I think they could be helpful are to share older posts to breathe fresh life into them. But also, look for the posts that brought you new subscribes and share those. Not all posts land the same way, but when you have one that worked well, it’s an eye catching way to get fresh eyes on it.

Hope you found that helpful :)