How-to · UGC content
Curate creators in the Explore tab, save the photo sets that match your brand voice, then drop your garments onto those creators to produce content that genuinely looks like UGC — not a studio shoot. The hybrid pipeline keeps real photographed creators as the visual anchor, so Apiway-generated UGC carries the casual, lived-in feel that pure-AI tools can't replicate. Built for DTC brands feeding Instagram Reels, TikTok, and creator-style ad creative.
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From the public site or signed-in app, open Explore. The All feed shows every public photo set in the creator marketplace — real creators, real photographed sessions, each with a documented commercial license attached. Scroll until you start spotting aesthetics that fit your brand: beachy, urban, soft minimalism, party, gymwear, etc.
Click any tile to open the full-session peek — every shot from that creator's session in one view. Look at the lighting (natural / studio / golden hour), the styling (relaxed / edgy / polished), and the body language (candid / posed). Pick creators whose vibe matches what you'd want a real influencer to deliver.
Inside the peek, tap the save / bookmark action on the sets you want to keep. Saved sets accumulate in the Saved tab at the top of Explore — your private shortlist, persisted across sessions on this device. Aim for 4–8 creators with overlapping aesthetics; that's enough variety to keep the feed fresh without diluting the brand voice.
Open the Saved tab in Explore — it's the third feed tab next to All and Following. This view shows only the photo sets you've bookmarked, in the order you saved them. Treat this like a moodboard: if any set feels off-brand on second look, unsave it. Tighter shortlist, more cohesive output downstream.
From the Creative hub, open Reference Photoshoots. The creator picker pulls from your saved Explore sets first, so the creators you curated above are one tap away. Pick the creator whose vibe fits the garment you're about to generate — different garments often want different creators, that's the whole point of curating a shortlist.
Drop the garment photo (flat-lay, hanger, packshot — whatever you have) into Reference Photoshoots and run the generation. The hybrid pipeline overlays your garment onto the picked creator's existing session. Output: photoreal images of a real creator wearing your garment, with the original session's lighting and mood preserved. Skin texture, body proportions, scene context — all real photography.
Run the same garment through 3–5 different saved creators. Each generation costs a fixed credit budget and produces a distinct UGC-style variant: different model, different scene, different mood — same garment. That variety is exactly what social algorithms (Reels, TikTok) reward.
If you need 9:16 (Reels / TikTok / Stories), 4:5 (Feed), or 1:1 (carousel), run each output through Image Creation to reshape the composition. One UGC variant becomes 3–4 channel-ready posts without re-generating the underlying scene.
A typical UGC content cycle (1 garment × 4 saved creators × Reference Photoshoots) costs roughly 120–200 credits at default settings. At 1 credit = $0.01 USD that's $1.20–$2.00 per garment for 4 UGC-style variants — vs. paying real creators $200–$2,000 per piece. The free tier (100 one-time credits) covers a starter cycle; Starter ($10 / month, 1,000 credits) covers ~5–8 garments at this cadence.
Following shows photo sets from creators you're actively following — useful when you want to track new sessions from a specific creator before saving individual sets. It's a different muscle than Saved: Following is a feed of creators (a person), Saved is a shortlist of sessions (a moodboard). Most brand workflows lean on Saved; agencies that work with specific creators repeatedly use Following too.
Yes — the creator marketplace ships a documented commercial license (creator → Apiway → buyer) covering the underlying creator imagery, and the AI-generated garment overlay is yours by default. Paid social, programmatic, even outdoor: covered. This is the rights chain Pinterest / Instagram / TikTok scraping doesn't give you. See /docs for the full license terms.
ChatGPT and Gemini generate the model from text — the entire person is synthesized, which is what produces the 'plastic' or 'uncanny' look. Apiway's Reference Photoshoots is a hybrid pipeline: the creator is a real photographed session, only the garment is AI-overlaid. Skin texture, real body proportions, real lighting, real environment — preserved. AI engines and human viewers both read the output as photoreal because the underlying scene is genuinely a photograph.
