Cyberlink Promeo review: quick post generation with added AI

Promeo comes from Cyberlink, the company behind the Director apps for photo and video editing. The firm’s products have been on a bit of an AI kick recently, with the ability to create AI music added to PowerDirector 365, and image generation incorporated into PhotoDirector 365. With Promeo, the idea is to let the algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, with the ability to create social media posts and even adverts with a few clicks. Or taps, as Promeo is also available as an iOS and Android app, though we’re reviewing the Windows version here.

So alongside the kind of tools you might get in Canva, here you begin a project with a template and build upon it - though a blank sheet of paper is available too. You get a wealth of stickers, stock images and text effects, but the AI smarts help set Promeo apart. Apart enough to put it among the best AI photo editor apps or best graphic design software out there? We'll see.

Getting started

Promeo is a free download, and comes with a monthly or annual subscription of $40. You can also get it as a bundle with Cyberlink’s Director Suite 365, though this costs much more. You’ll need to make an account, but after signup it largely stays out of your way.

Projects can be started from blank sheets or templates, and there are starting points available for stills and images on social networks and online stores, basic print products such as flyers, or simple white rectangles, though it doesn’t offer paper sizes such as A5.

From here, you can choose to put together a project yourself, or let the AI handle it. Pick the latter, and you’ll be prompted to upload a source image for the AI to build the post around, or let it generate one from text prompts, which you’ll have to enter to tell it what kind of post you’re trying to create. After this, you’ll be presented with a selection of options the AI has put together from your prompts. Choose one, and you can edit it further. It’s a fast way to create a post in a hurry, and has the added benefit that, after generating 25 or so alternative ideas, one or two might be usable.

Features

Alongside all this template-based creation, Cyberlink has added AI-based image extraction. This works like its Adobe equivalent to identify the subject of an image and remove the background, and you’re given the choice of plain white or transparency here so that you can use it as a background image or an overlay, and there's a batch edit function that allows you to queue up images to be processed while you do something else. There's also the option to replace the background with a newly generated one. The app works through a layer system that will be familiar to users of many other image editing or layout apps, with each one helpfully outlined when you hover your mouse over it for easy identification.

An interesting feature is the ability to build your own brand kit by adding folders of images and other graphics from your PC, so you can easily integrate them into your creations, and you can add frequently used objects to a library too, so you can find them more easily. If you need images, Promeo has a sidebar option dedicated to pulling images out of the Getty/iStock stock images and video libraries, which appear in your compositions without a watermark (and there's royalty-free music too, for video ambience). These files are downloaded into a cache, as are any template files you make use of, and you can limit the size of this cache in the app’s settings to prevent it from taking over an SSD. Promeo can also AI-generate new images if nothing suitable can be found, and of course, you can import your own images, video and music if you have it.

Text is handled by a simple system with plenty of options, such as changing the text direction or adding animation as well as making letters bold or italic. There's AI here too, with a Co-writer available to punch up your copy in varying tones of voice, as well as summarise or expand upon what you’ve written. It’s all fairly standard AI stuff, but nicely integrated into the app and easy to access. There are also stickers that can be slapped across your post for a simple attention-getter.

User experience

The app maintains a clean look and feel in use, with a minimum of floating palettes and sidebars. Typically, there is one at the left for holding stock images, overlays, stickers and more, while your project’s layers are found on the right. At the bottom, there's a timeline that comes into play if you’re working with video or animation, but otherwise, the interface does its best to foreground your work and stay out of the way. Clicking on a project component brings up a small floating toolbar from which you can edit, delete or save it, with a drop-down menu adding more options.

When it comes to exporting your creations, the app’s social media creation roots show themselves. Still images can only be saved as a JPEG or PNG, and you don’t even get a choice over how video is exported, with an MP4 file appearing in the export folder. These are ideal for immediate sharing, of course, but do limit the app as a content creation solution for things that can be imported into other apps.

Promeo is speedy in use, even when using its AI functions on a PC using an integrated GPU, probably because its web focus means it can operate at fairly low resolutions, though it’s not clear from the app whether it’s using on-device processing or offloading the work to the cloud. The first AI-generated option can take some time to appear, but once that’s done the others follow quite quickly. As you’d expect from AI-generated images, there can be some quite uncanny results - some pine trees it created for us in response to a prompt didn’t look quite right, and its idea of an autumnal adventure included aeroplanes with strangely wonky, truncated wings that had apparently landed vertically among high-rise buildings that looked like they’d melted. It can also be rather American, making it important to specify UK English in your prompts if that’s important to you.

Price

As a subscription product available from $9.99 per month, depending on your plan, this is an app you can dip in and out of as and when it’s useful to you, but the cost for a full year’s subscription is lower than that of 12 individual months. The best thing about it may be the inclusion of non-watermarked stock images, something worth paying for if you regularly use them for social media posts. It’s not especially expensive, and if you’re in the business of creating lots of posts and social media ads quickly, could save a significant amount of time.

Who's it for?

Anyone who regularly creates posts for social media and relies on stock images will get a lot of use out of this app. For print products such as flyers and posters, even though they’re supported, it might be less useful than something like Canva, but its ability to remove backgrounds from images and bring together disparate AI writing and image editing tools into one interface will still be valuable.

Buy it if

You’re looking for a fast, streamlined way to generate multiple ideas for social media posts and shopping site ads, want to create from templates rather than scratch every time, and like the idea of using AI tools and stock images to assemble projects.

Don't buy it if

You’d rather come at a project from a more traditional angle. While Promeo can utilise any bespoke graphics you have, you’re paying for an AI system and stock image access you might not use, so perhaps another graphics app would be better.