Using Adobe Creative Cloud Express for social images and photo galleries

Author’s Note: This post was written when Express was a product named Adobe Spark. It’s been rebranded as Adobe Creative Cloud Express. Pardon any confusion between Spark and Express in the writing and images here. I still, in 2022, use the Express product at least once a week for Featured Images in WordPress, and for banners on the ayso87.org site.

Ever heard of Express?

I had, but it was one of a ton of apps that I never really have time to investigate. But I ran into the product team at Social Media Marketing World (I love that conference!) and got to see a run-through of the product.

What Express does

Express lets you (very) quickly create:

• posters for social media sharing
• photo galleries that act like parallax web pages
• video clips with slide text (some call these video sales letters, or VSL)

My very first Express project was “Mr. Sullivan goes to Washington” where I created a page that highlighted my 1/2 day in D.C. wandering around the National Mall.

With almost no knowledge of the product, the project took just an hour or two, and I was really happy with the results. Here’s the project itself, and I’ve included a few tips below to help you create your own Express masterpiece!

Tips for creating a Express Page

To  get the most from Express quickly, do the following:

• Spend time organizing your images so you can quickly place them
• Color correct and crop using your image editor of choice. I use Adobe Photoshop and/or Adobe Bridge’s Camera Raw functionality
  (If you don’t use Adobe products, sorry, but I’m an Adobe guy from way back! Like 1988 back…)
• Reduce image sizes using an image editor (same as above). I left the resolution alone, but knocking back the JPEG compression to 5 saved 75% of the file size, and dramatically reduced upload time.
• Try out all the different options for placing images. Mix them up, and provide captions for interest.

Using Express content

Once I created the page, I just took the link provided by Adobe, pasted into Facebook, pasted into a tweet, and used the embed code to insert into this blog post, and an email to the Tech Comm Tools community.

That’s it… now I have a permanent record of my day, that I can share with friends and family. Have you used Express yet? Paste a link to any cool content you’ve created in Express, especially Page and Video projects!