Originally published on bants.dev. I'm Anthony, a consultant and software engineer, and I write up the things I build.
An estate agent I know flagged how much time, skill and money goes into social posts for every property. So I built propvid.app, a browser extension that turns a listing into a narrated slideshow in minutes.
An estate agent I know pointed out something obvious once you hear it. Putting together social posts for every property takes time, skill and money. Photos are already on the listing. Getting them into something that looks professional, with a voiceover, is the hard part.
It's a browser extension. Once you're set up on a licensed site, a button shows on the listing page. Open a property, click it, and it pulls the images and the listing details. You pick your shots, choose a look, and get a slideshow back with a custom script and a voiceover, in most of the popular languages for clients in the area.
No dumping a folder of photos into yet another editor. It starts on the page the agent already uses.
Anyone in the business can knock out a professional-looking slideshow with a natural-sounding voiceover in a matter of minutes. Same listing photos. Different shapes for the platforms that need them. Narration that sounds like it belongs to the buyer you're talking to, not a generic clip-art voice from nowhere.
That was the whole point. Time, skill and money were the problem. Minutes should be the answer.
Making the motion look smooth took longer than I'd like to admit. Early slideshows looked soft and stepped when they zoomed. Fine on a laptop. Wrong once you watched them on a phone.
Audio had its own fun. The first moment of the voiceover kept getting clipped, so the narration started mid-breath. Dull to fix. Very noticeable if you don't.
Accents mattered more than I expected too. If your buyers are in one country, a voice from somewhere else sounds wrong, even when the words are right. Getting that filtered properly was fiddly.
And the preview had to match the final video. If it looked one way in the wizard and came out different as a file, agents wouldn't trust it. Keeping those two in sync saved a whole class of "it looked different when I downloaded it" messages.
There are some more features planned, but I'll keep those under wraps for now. If you've fought any of the same battles (smooth zooms, clipped audio, preview vs export), I'd like to hear how you solved them.