Be honest with me for three to five minutes. I'll go first.
I love this. I love the moment a seed lands and something comes out better than the thing that was in my head. I have loved it more than twenty-three thousand times, because that is roughly how many images I have put on this site. Three and a half thousand posts' worth.
Generating them was never the hard part.
The hard part is the gap. The gap between I made a good picture and that picture is live, credited, tagged, posted at a time when somebody is awake, and I am certain it is not the second time I have posted it.
That gap is where my evenings go. And right now, on my own machine, there are somewhere between five hundred and three thousand images stuck inside it.
Not because they're bad. For a handful of reasons I am about to walk you through.
Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. Or tell me I'm alone. Honestly, either answer helps.
"Wait. Did I already post this one?"
At twenty-three thousand images, let me be very clear about something: there is no version of me that remembers. There is no mental index. There is a vague feeling, and the vague feeling is wrong about as often as it's right.
So you go and check. You open your own profile. You scroll your own gallery like a stranger. You squint at a thumbnail from March trying to work out whether that is this cat or a different cat with the same lighting. Twenty minutes later you are four hundred posts deep with three thousand more still below you, you have proven nothing either way and you have genuinely forgotten which image you came here to look for.
And then you do the thing I am least proud of.
You don't post it.
Because the other outcome is a comment that says "love this one, you posted it in spring too," and it is the friendliest sentence in the world, and everybody can see it, and I would like to close the laptop and walk directly into the sea.
So the picture goes back in the folder. Not deleted. Just not risked.
I have no idea how many good images I have quietly buried because I couldn't prove to myself that I hadn't already shown them to you. I suspect the number is not small. I would rather not think about it.
The four hundred that all look equally unposted
LoRA test day. Same prompt, same seed, eight strengths, six checkpoints, and by the end of the evening a folder holding essentially the same picture wearing slightly different hats, four hundred times over.
Somewhere in there is the one I actually posted. Somewhere in there are three more I should have.
Six weeks later I open that folder again, and every one of those four hundred files looks exactly as posted, or exactly as unposted, as every other one. My drive knows the filename, the date and the size. It does not know the single thing I need, which is what happened to it afterwards.
So the folder stays. All four hundred of them. Because deleting might kill the good one, and sorting it out properly is an evening I would rather spend generating more images, which (and I want you to appreciate the beauty of this) creates another folder exactly like it.
The pictures I never had in the first place
Sometimes I don't generate locally at all. Either it has to go fast, or the model is considerably larger than my GPU has any intention of loading. So I generate on the site and post straight out of the generator.
Which is lovely. Two clicks, done, live.
And it also means that picture was never on my machine. Not once.
That is fine while it is still sitting in the generator. The generator keeps it for thirty days. Thirty days is ages when you are thinking about it and no time at all when you are not, and I am reliably not. So one day the thirty days are up, and the only copy of that image anywhere is the post.
Still fine. Right up until I want it back.
And getting it back means opening my own image feed and downloading them one at a time. Click. Save. Click. Save. For a set of six. For last month's sets as well, if I am feeling thorough, which I have never once been past image four.
So there is a hole in my library shaped exactly like everything I made on the good days when I was in a hurry.
What I publish under my own name
masterpiece, best quality, ((ultra detailed)), <lora:something_v7:0.8>, 8k, absurdres. Plus a negative prompt I copied off somebody's post in my first week and have never questioned since.
That is what sits underneath a picture I actually worked hard on. It means nothing to the person reading it. Half of it probably meant nothing to the model either.
The checkpoint and the LoRAs that did the real work get attached when I remember to attach them, and not at all when I don't. So the person whose LoRA made the picture possible gets no credit, and the picture gets no route for anybody to find it. Both of those are my fault. Both of them happen because it was late and I was on post fourteen.
Title, description, tags: still empty
Not because I don't care. Because I've been burned.
Here's the thing about all that text: none of it lives on my machine. It lives on the site. And posts get deleted. Sometimes the upload went sideways. Sometimes the site was simply having an evening and I found out halfway through.
Whatever the reason, the fix is always the same. Delete it. Do it again.
And do it again is not retyping a sentence. If I was clever, I copied everything out into a text file before I hit delete. If I wasn't, I am back in another tab, uploading the same six images to a chatbot for the fifth time, asking it again for a title, a description and a set of tags, then pasting the answers back one field at a time.
So after enough of those, you learn. You stop investing in something you might have to produce twice.
The description stays empty. So does the title. So do the tags. Not because they don't matter. Because an empty field cannot be lost.
Which is how you end up with three and a half thousand posts, most of them carrying nothing that would help a single human being find them. Not because I didn't care about the pictures. Because I wasn't willing to make the post twice.
Batch day, or: how I stopped being a creator and became data entry
And then there are the evenings where I decide to do it properly anyway.
I pre-generated for three weeks. Excellent. Wonderful. Now I have to actually post it.
Post one: images into the chatbot, a good title back, a thoughtful description, carefully chosen tags. Post four: still holding up. Post nine: I have stopped reading what comes back and I am pasting it straight in. Post fourteen: I am reusing the tags from post eleven because they were close enough. Post eighteen: the description is the word "cool".
Three weeks of generating. One evening of being a very slow copy and paste machine with eighteen browser tabs open.
Ten posts, ten little clocks, no times
Credit where it's due: I can schedule a post. That part exists, it works, I use it.
Then I plan the next nine.
And when I look at them together, what I get is a row of drafts with a small clock icon on each. The icon means scheduled. It does not mean when. To find out when, I open the post. Then I go back. Then I open the next one. Then I go back.
So there is a text file sitting next to the browser with ten lines in it, because that text file is the only place in the world where my own publishing plan exists in one piece. Thursday 19:00. Friday 08:00. Friday 20:00. Is that last pair too close together? I genuinely cannot tell without opening two posts and closing them again.
And when I decide the whole run should move a day later, that is not a setting. That is ten posts opened one at a time, plus a rewrite of the text file.
I am keeping a spreadsheet about a website, in 2026, because the website will not show me a list it already has.
And then, on post ten
This one still makes me put my head on the desk.
Ten posts planned. A whole evening of it. Images chosen, text written, times worked out, the text file finally agreeing with reality.
And on post ten I notice the ratings never went through. Not one of my images has one.
Which means the first post, the one going out in eleven minutes, is going out to nobody at all.
So the fix is: delete all ten, wait until ratings work again, then plan the entire evening a second time from the beginning. Same images. Same text, if I was smart enough to have kept it. Same ten times, worked out again, into the same text file.
That is the evening that taught me not to write descriptions.
So of course there is another text file
By now you can probably guess how I know which picture ended up in which post.
Another text file. It says things like cat one, post 14, went out 03.09, the version with the fixed hand, the one in render_b, not render_b2. Written by me, at night, in whatever shorthand made sense at the time.
There is an older one somewhere doing the same job in a slightly different format, because at some point I changed my mind about the format. There is a third I abandoned halfway through August. There are notes sitting inside two of my image folders. And there are maybe twenty files next to those folders whose names mean nothing to me any more, and at least one of them is almost certainly a plan.
None of it is wrong, exactly. It just stopped being true at some point and did not tell me when.
So the file on my drive cannot say it went out in March. The post cannot say which file it came from. The picture I am about to schedule cannot say it is nearly identical to something I put up six weeks ago. And the images I finished last year sit in exactly the same folder as the ones I finished tonight, because as far as my drive is concerned nothing has ever been finished at all.
My machine holds the pictures. CivitAI holds what became of them.
The only thing holding both is me, in a text file, at half past midnight.
So, is it just me?
I need to know, and I'm asking properly:
Which one of these did you feel in your chest? Drop it in the comments. I will not judge you. I am in no position to judge anyone.
For most of those twenty-three thousand images I assumed this was a me problem. A discipline thing. Something everybody else had quietly sorted out while I was busy producing my four hundredth version of the same cat.
Lately I have started to suspect that every single one of you has a folder you don't quite dare to post from either.
Generating has never been easier.
Everything that happens after generating is still exactly as stupid as it was on my first day.
But not for much longer. Enough is enough.
Solution is coming!
This weekend.
Keep your eyes open. More of it lands between now and then, and it will make a lot more sense once you've seen the rest.