12 Blog Images in One Afternoon

I used to hate the image step.

Not writing. Not editing. Just: finish article, realize I need a header image, spend twenty minutes making something forgettable, upload it. Every single time.

Last month I sat down one afternoon and made images for every article I’ve ever written and every article I plan to write this year. All of them. In a few hours.

Here’s what I actually did.

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I started with Midjourney style references.

This is the unlock most people skip. Midjourney lets you save a visual direction: a URL or a code that captures the aesthetic. Mine are saved. When I generate images now, I only describe what the image is of. Not the lighting, not the color palette, not the mood. Just the subject. The style reference handles everything else.

So a prompt isn’t five lines of aesthetic direction. It’s one sentence about content.

I gave an AI agent my full list of articles. Told it to write Midjourney prompts for each one. Subject-only prompts. Then I explicitly said: “I don’t need explanation. Just give me the prompts.” Without that, you get paragraphs of preamble first.

Ran them all. Downloaded what worked.

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Then: one command.

convert *.png -quality 85 -set filename:base '%[basename]' '%[filename:base].jpg'

That’s ImageMagick. Every PNG drops to a JPEG at 85% quality. File sizes fall by 60-70% with no visible difference. The agent renamed everything and moved files to the right folders.

Then I put the extra images in a folder called blog-images-swipe. When I write something new, I check the swipe file first. Sometimes the image is already there.

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The mental shift wasn’t the tool. It was batch vs. one at a time.

One at a time feels efficient. It feels like you’re only doing what’s needed. But one at a time means every publish day starts with “oh right, I still need an image.” Creative friction at exactly the wrong moment.

One batch session means that problem is over. Done. Not for this week. For the year.

There’s a version of this for almost every recurring task that involves creation. The question worth asking: am I doing this one at a time because it has to be, or because I never stopped to batch it?

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One thing to do: find one recurring production task you do every week and ask whether you could batch the next month of it in one session. Images, social graphics, email headers. One afternoon of setup, months of friction removed.

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