What is Flow? (automation pipelines)

This article explains what Flow is, how it differs from rendering designs one at a time, and what you can build with the visual pipeline builder.

What is Flow?

Flow is a visual pipeline builder that lets you automate a full batch of photos from a single canvas. Instead of opening each design, dropping in a photo, and sending it individually, you wire up a sequence of steps — and Flow runs every photo through that sequence for you.

How Flow differs from one-at-a-time rendering

Normally, creating a finished image in Templified looks like this: open a design, place a photo, configure the template, then send it to a destination. That works well for small batches and one-off edits, but it doesn't scale to dozens or hundreds of photos.

Flow flips the model: you describe the pipeline once, then run it against any number of photos.

One design at a time	Flow
Open a design, drop in one photo, send	Drop all photos into the flow at once
Repeat for every subject	Every step runs on every photo automatically
Manual review between steps	Steps chain together without stopping
Triggered by a person opening the app	Can trigger automatically via a webhook when a new photo arrives

The Flows tab

A Flows tab appears in the top navigation bar of every organization.

The Flows page is organized into four tabs, ordered to match the setup flow: Connection (create the photo source), Routing (send each photo to the right flow), Flows (your list of flows), and Activity (the delivery log).

Members see the Flows list and the Activity delivery log, and can replay a delivery from Activity — the log answers “did my photo arrive, and what did it produce?”, which is a question every photographer needs to answer without waiting on an admin. Connection and Routing stay owner and admin only, because they show the credentials that let an outside system send photos in and start runs on your account.

The first time you open the Flows page as an owner or admin, a Get started setup checklist card sits above the tabs. It walks you through three steps in order — Connect a source, Create a flow, and Route photos to flows — each with a short hint and a jump link to the tab that owns it. A counter shows how many are finished (for example, 2 of 3 done), and the page opens on the first step you haven't completed. Once all three are done, the card collapses to a small Setup complete strip.

Flows landing page with the Get started setup checklist card and the Connection/Routing/Flows/Activity tab bar

The visual canvas

The Flow builder canvas showing a Photos start node connected to a Remove Background step and a Create Image step

Opening a flow (or creating a new one) takes you to a canvas where each step is a node you can drag and connect. The canvas is built around a left sidebar called Steps, where the available step types are grouped by purpose so related steps sit together:

Photo
- Remove Background — cuts out the subject and detects the face.
- Remove Glare — removes glasses glare from photos with glasses; appears when your organization has Glare Removal enabled (running it requires a connected Skylab account). See the Flow step reference for details.
Format
- Text — derives a new per-photo field from an existing one (for example, extracting a session name from a longer event string).
- Format Date — turns a date field into a formatted date or a week number in a new field.
Logic
- Branch — routes each photo down a different path based on its fields.
- Filter — continues only the photos that match a condition and drops the rest.
Design
- Create Image — renders a template into a finished image.
- Create Editable Design Only — creates an editable design in Studio, without rendering an image.
- Create Editable Design & Render — creates an editable design in Studio and renders it in one step.
- Create Team Photo — fans all the run's photos into a single team-layout design.
Send & route
- Run Flow — hands each photo to another flow to finish processing.
- Call Service — sends each photo to an external service.
- Send To — dispatches a finished image or design to a send preset or destination.

Every flow starts with a Photos node that you can't delete — it's where photos enter the pipeline. Select it and use the Trigger dropdown to say where its photos come from:

Photos (manual upload) — you upload photos here, with an optional CSV of their fields, and run the flow by hand.
Templified Tether or Studio drop — photos delivered to Templified run the flow automatically, whether they were captured in the Templified Tether app or dragged onto one of the event's Studio folders. Both arrive the same way, so one setting covers both. On the canvas the start node carries a Tether / Studio drop badge.
External system (GFITpro / webhook) — an outside system such as GFITpro posts a photo and its fields through your organization's connection (Flows → Connection) to run the flow.

Either of the two delivered-photo triggers fires the flow from the delivery itself, so there's nothing to run by hand — the editor's Run button is disabled and reads Tether / Drop or Webhook instead. The flow's start step also shows whether delivered photos are routed to reach this flow.

Running a flow

Once your pipeline is wired up, click Run in the editor header. Flow validates the graph (checks that all required fields are filled and that connections between steps are compatible), then processes every photo through each step in order. A results panel opens alongside the canvas and shows the status of each step as it completes.

You can revisit past runs from the Runs dropdown in the editor header — each run shows per-step status and links to any designs or images it created.

What you can build

A few common pipeline shapes:

Batch render: Photos → Create Image → Send To. The simplest pipeline: render every photo against one template and deliver the images to a destination.
Background removal + render: Photos → Remove Background → Create Image → Send To. Automatically cuts out every subject before rendering.
Team photo: Photos → Remove Background → Create Team Photo → Send To. Combine individual cut-outs into a team layout in one pass — or, when photos arrive one at a time through your connection, build up the same team design across runs.
Design and render together: Photos → Create Editable Design & Render → Send To. Save an editable design to Studio and deliver the finished image in the same pass.
Route by data: Add a Branch or Filter step to send photos down different paths — for example, filter out photos missing a jersey number, or branch teams onto different templates.
Per-photo text from a CSV: Upload a CSV on the Photos node; columns like name and jersey number become variables you can insert into any text field on a Create Image or Create Editable Design Only step.
Drop photos in Studio: When an event routes to a flow, dragging photos onto a folder under that event runs the flow once per photo, straight from Studio — no upload step in the flow editor. See Drag & Drop photos to run a flow.
Connection-triggered pipeline: Set the Photos node's trigger to External system and point your photo-capture system (such as GFITpro) at your organization's connection (Flows → Connection) — each incoming photo triggers a run automatically.