The auto-create rules
These are the settings that decide what each poster actually gets, per title, every night. They are the reason a template is worth building — and none of them was documented anywhere but the tooltip.
Colour
| Rule | Choices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Color source | The template's saved colour · Each title's own artwork | Where each poster's accent colour and texture tint come from. The template's saved colour paints every title the same. Each title's own artwork derives it per title, so the set looks varied rather than uniform. |
| Color matching across | Nothing — each title's own · Franchise / pinned collection | Only meaningful with Each title's own artwork. Shares one colour across a group instead of letting each title pick its own, so a franchise comes out as a set rather than a spectrum. |
| Match color from | The group's art · The group's logo | Which image the shared colour is sampled from. Only applies once matching is on. |
Grey controls are not broken — Color matching across and Match color from are inactive while Color source is the template's saved colour, because there is nothing per-title to match.
What is drawn on the poster
| Rule | Choices | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Network | Off — no network · The template's · Auto network, else streaming · Auto streaming, else network | The network wordmark. The template's keeps the one saved with the design — which means one show's mark on every title it dresses, so it is rarely what you want on an auto-create template. The two Auto choices stamp each show with its own: Auto network, else streaming uses the broadcast network (ABC, HBO) and falls back to the streamer; Auto streaming, else network prefers where it streams (Hulu, Netflix). Brand marks (Plex, Simkl, MDBList) are not shipped; upload your own. Offered only on designs that have a network slot, including your own template if it has a network box. |
| Cover badge | Off · The title's own year · Custom text · The template's image | A circle, on the older templates — Fade, Bezel, Notched, Slant. Not Blank, which carries no badge by design. The same control governs the year line on the twelve canvas designs. Cover only: season posters always badge the season number, and this does not change that. |
| Year line | Off · The title's own year · Custom text | A text line, on the twelve canvas designs. Not a badge with a different look — those designs have no badge circle at all, and the year is part of the layout's grammar rather than an addition: without it the design closes up around the gap. No image option, because there is no circle to fill. Defaults to ON, and to the title's own year — the opposite of the badge's default, and deliberate on both counts. A canvas design missing its year line is one of the two ways these layouts collapse into each other; and a switch named Year line that lands on Custom with nothing typed draws nothing at all, which looks like the switch is broken. Size and font are beside it on the Extra tab; its colours — the plate and the year on it — are under Year box in Colors. |
| Logo | A language, or No logo | Which clearlogo to prefer, falling back to a language-neutral one. No logo draws none at all — nothing is looked up, and a title is never held back for having none. |
| No logo found | Skip the poster · Draw the title instead · Draw the title with AI | Default is skip, deliberately — a poster with no title treatment looks broken. Draw the title instead writes the title's name where the logo would have gone, in this template's free-text styling. Set that styling first and leave the text itself empty; only the words come from the title. Skipped titles are listed under Choose Artwork › Needs artwork › Logo. Offered only on designs that draw a logo: Blank draws none, and a design already carrying free text has a title treatment of its own. |
| New poster per season | Its own (with fallback) · Its own art only · Reuse the cover | Whether each season gets its own poster, and whether it may fall back to the show's art when the season has none. TV only. |
| Collection banner | Collections only · Never | The banner belongs on a collection's own poster. Collections only keeps it on collections and sub-collections and strips it from the titles inside. Available on Fade, Blank, Bands, Bezel and Notched — the designs that draw it. |
Draw the title with AI is the third choice, and it is the one worth explaining. Instead of writing the title in this template's free-text styling, Kustos asks an image model for a wordmark matched to the title's own poster typography and colour — so it reads like a logo rather than like a caption.
- One call per title, once it succeeds. The result is saved into that title's own folder as logo.png and reused from then on, so a settled poster never redraws. Without a Local assets folder set, nothing is saved, so every redraw makes another call. Delete that file to ask again, or drop your own logo over it and yours wins.
- A failure never skips the poster. No key, a rate limit, an empty answer — all of them fall back to drawing the title as type.
- Collections with a TMDB id get the whole name in one treatment, including the word "Collection", which drawing it as type cannot do. A collection Kustos built itself, with no TMDB id, is drawn as type.
- Seasons always use type, never AI.
- It is recorded as auto-create, so an AI wordmark and a text-drawn one cannot be told apart by where they came from.
- It uses the same Gemini Vision key as textless detection, and that card is Gemini specifically — the artwork side talks to Google's endpoint directly and takes no other provider. Without a key this option draws the title as type instead, so nothing breaks; it simply never uses AI. See AI keys.
Textless detection needs an AI key, and it is the hungry one. Knowing which source art has the title baked in is what lets auto-create pick a clean plate to draw your logo on. Without a Gemini Vision key the detection is off and selection falls back to textless-first — auto-create still works. With one, the first sweep over a large library takes days rather than minutes, by design. See Getting your keys → Which features need something extra.
Why a rule may not be shown
Rules appear only on templates that can act on them, so a switch is never offered where it would do nothing:
- Network needs a design with a network slot — or, on your own template, a network box with a real width and height.
- Collection banner needs Fade, Blank, Bands, Bezel or Notched.
- No logo found needs a design that draws a logo, and no free text already.
- Season rules need the template to apply to Shows.
- Franchise rules need it to apply to Movies or movie collections — a TMDB set is a movie concept.
A template with no kind chosen yet still shows every rule. That state is unscoped, not "not TV", and hiding a rule somebody is about to need is worse than showing one they may not.