Meme templates

Reusable meme layouts with local Pillow composition — no AI tokens required.

Compose common meme formats locally with Pillow. Templates work with your own images or text-only panels (solid backgrounds with wrapped labels). Output defaults to ~/Pictures/arka-generated/ (override with IMAGE_OUTPUT_DIR).

Templates

Template	CLI subcommand	Description
Comparison	comparison	Side-by-side panels with titles
Drake	drake	Reject (top) vs accept (bottom)
Caption	caption	Classic top/bottom text meme
Expanding brain	expanding-brain	Four escalating panels
Two button	two-button	Dilemma with two red buttons
Vibe coding preset	vibe-coding	Built-in architecture comparison

Stock photos (real images)

By default, meme panels try to fetch relevant stock photos (Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Openverse, web) when you do not pass --left / --right / --image paths. Labels are overlaid on top of the photo. If lookup fails, Arka falls back to the text-only panels.

# Uses stock photos automatically (you have UNSPLASH_ACCESS_KEY or openverse/web)
arka meme vibe-coding

# Force text-only panels (previous behavior)
arka meme vibe-coding --no-stock-images

# Custom stock search queries for comparison panels
arka meme comparison \
  --left-title "MONOLITH" --right-title "MICROSERVICES" \
  --left-label "One deploy\nOne repo" \
  --right-label "Many services\nMany repos" \
  --left-query "legacy server room" \
  --right-query "cloud architecture diagram office"

Set MEME_USE_STOCK_PHOTOS=0 in .env to disable stock lookup globally.

Visual styles

Meme and video generation share style presets in arka/media/media_styles.py.

# List meme styles
arka meme styles

# Neon vibe-coding meme with stock photos
arka meme vibe-coding --style neon

# NL
arka make a retro drake meme reject "skip tests" accept "write tests"

# List video styles
arka compose_video styles

# Cinematic explainer video
arka compose_video compose --topic "quantum computing" --llm --style cinematic

# AI video (Veo / Pollinations)
arka ai_video "drone over mountains" --style cinematic -d 6

Meme styles	Video styles
classic, dark, neon, retro, corporate, comic, cinematic, minimal, vaporwave, newspaper	documentary, cinematic, tech, minimal, neon, retro, news, social, corporate, nature

Defaults: MEME_STYLE=classic, VIDEO_STYLE=documentary.

Examples

Text-only comparison (no image assets needed):

arka meme comparison \
  --left-title "VIBE CODING" --right-title "SOFTWARE ENGINEERING" \
  --left-label "Ship fast\nSkip tests" \
  --right-label "Design first\nTests & review" \
  --output ~/Pictures/arka-generated/vibe-vs-engineering.png

Built-in preset for the vibe-coding vs software-engineering meme:

arka meme vibe-coding

Drake hotline bling layout:

arka meme drake \
  --reject "Deploy on Friday" \
  --accept "Merge with tests green"

Caption meme over an existing image:

arka meme caption \
  --image photo.jpg \
  --top "WHEN THE BUILD PASSES" \
  --bottom "ON THE FIRST TRY"

Expanding brain (four --label flags):

arka meme expanding-brain \
  --label "console.log()" \
  --label "debugger" \
  --label "unit tests" \
  --label "distributed tracing"

Two-button choice:

arka meme two-button \
  --dilemma "Production is on fire" \
  --left "Rollback" --right "Hotfix in prod" \
  --highlight left

Natural language

Phrases like make a drake meme, comparison meme, expanding brain meme, and vibe coding vs software engineering meme route to arka meme … automatically.

Related

For side-by-side layouts that always require image files, see Symbolic image composition.