Organization Tips for MidJourney AI Art Tutorial | MidJourney Master Class | Art Organization 101

today's mid-journey guide episode is all about fixing my mistakes with my workflow and making sure you don't have to deal with the issues that I deal on a daily basis and in fact I'm recording this before I even officially start recording the rest of this Guide Series specifically because I don't want to wait any longer to actually improve my workflow and I have a lot of tips to share when it comes to organization both on the Discord side and your file side you're not going to want to miss this hell I'd even argue that in terms of doing this for actual art for actually building something this might be more important than a lot of the actual like art Generation stuff I teach you so I will have already covered at this point in the course the different ways that you can interact with mid-journey be it on the server itself which in terms of organization is going to be a nightmare I have so many images lost to the depths of Hell in here or by dming the bot for which my conversation history goes back way too far and I'm already losing track of things or by adding it to your own server which I have done in this little what was originally an inspiration board server for me here here but as you can see I have a bunch of different AI based chats and I have scrolling upon scrolling upon scrolling worth of images and I can no longer keep track of anything even though I've gone through and I've made different channels which by the way if you're not familiar with that aspect of Discord we're going to talk about it even though I've gone through and done all of this I'm already unable to keep up with things if managing channels in Discord is too overwhelming or you're just like me and you get overwhelmed once you've generated too many projects or you're like me as well and you start generating one image and you upscale a whole bunch and then you want to generate more and it just becomes a lot to keep up with I got some cool ideas so first we're gonna knock out an easy one and I'm going to make a folder structure so I'm going to show you the window or this applies to any operating system but you know your computer side where you're going to save the images before we get to the Discord side to keep it nice and friendly so I'm going to go to view extra large icons here to make it easier for you I'm going to make a new folder and this is just going to be AI art projects now in this folder I'm going to start setting up projects in an organized fashion now this actually mirrors the way that I handle video projects so for example right now I'm going to open up a folder for an ongoing video project that I have going uh it's going to actually be about AI art funny enough and I actually have a button on my device called a stream deck which runs a script and allows me to immediately create a bunch of folders based on the project now there's some extraneous ones here but ones for my video projects again we're going to turn this around to apply to Art but the ones that I consistently use for every single video project is a-roll which is my on camera talking head part b-roll which is like product shots Glam shots extra illustrative points we've got exports which are just my final exported videos that I upload Graphics you know on-screen visuals project files self-explanatory screen sound effects screen is just extra screen captures that aren't part of the normal recording and then thumbnail Generation stuff and then of course any extra stuff ends up in here as well and so I'm going to set up a similar thing for art projects so I'm going to make first make a folder and this is going to be called template folder and this is just going to be what I base my other folders off of that way you can copy paste it moving forward or you could set up an advanced script if you know what you're doing on that front so for art projects think about these specific assets and images and things like that that you want to use this is going to be unique to you and the types of art projects that you do however I can give you a template of what I'm going to be working with so I'm going to make a folder for inspo which is just inspiration Graphics either things that didn't come from mid Journey or AI generated tools that I'm basing it off of or general ideas that I have I'm going to do roughs which is rough sketches be it that I draw on something like my iPad or that I have created with mid-journey as a general idea we're going to say selects or you could call it keepers those are the Arts that you for sure want to keep and then we're going to say project files that's going to be your Photoshop files your your Affinity designer files those kinds of things are gonna go in here what else I'm gonna use so we've got my inspiration the files I'm for sure keeping extra roughs just in case I want to reference them come back to them whatever project files oh and then of course exports again we want oh okay so I'm gonna do stock these are stock assets extra assets that I get from other libraries that I license like uh envato or Getty Images or something like that those are going to go in there because they are separate they are licensed different and I want to keep them separate if you have Graphics templates brushes things like that that you download on a per project basis you want to keep a similar stock folder and then lastly of course we have our exports your final renders however you want to refer to that your final exported images that you are then going to take and list on a website post to social media what have you so I like to keep it not super big less than 10 folders uh if there's more than that you probably need to start making subfolders so for example for Keepers you might want to separate out keepers of the the the normal image versus the light upscaled versus the max upscale or versus using upscaling in a third-party tool like we'll talk about in this course and so for that that would mean you make subfolders so we'll call this like normal size and that would go in the keepers folder rather than making a bunch of extra folders within your base project folder because that would get really confusing so we'll make normal size of scaled light scaled and again this is specifically an application to Mid Journey once you're working with other tools you'll probably want a little bit of a different structure and then uh upscaled other for like outside tools maybe not the most intuitive way to go but you see what I mean of if I I could just put all those folders in the broader you know project folder root folder that would get really confusing because it's just it's just too many to keep up with you want you want some layers but you also don't want to go too deep in some layers so if you want to quickly find an image you know it's there but also you can use the search function as well so now we have our template folder you don't want to mess with your template folder this is the one that you're going to use to base all your other projects off of so if I want to make a new project then we copy this folder either Ctrl C or the copy button and just click out so it's not selected anything and paste it and it's going to make it and call it template folder copy but then we can rename it so for example this will be computer dreaming is the project that I want to work on here then I can start saving my Assets in there if you haven't Elgato stream deck and things like that I can post a holes or a macro pad of some sort I can post a whole separate little mini tutorial about automating that just to make your life easier it may be on a different Channel but either way I'll have it linked below but that's the general idea for your file organization on your operating system side and this is the same thing that will apply to Linux Mac or Windows and for the most part your iPad OS as well normal mobile OS gets a little funky with file management but iPad OS looks mostly the same I may make again a separate Sub full sub video talking about that on iPad or I will for sure have a whole dedicated video about managing it on iPad so we can talk about it there if desired let me know your questions about that in the comments below all right now we gotta look at the mid Journey side so again there's three different ways you can interact with mid-journey if you are just interacting in the mid Journey server and you don't want to take it anywhere else I would recommend doing so if you're going to get serious about it especially if you want to use private modems up but if so then you just need to leverage saving your images which you can do by either right clicking them once you've clicked on them and save image and annoyingly with Discord it's going to take you back to your default downloads folder every time this window right here which means you have to pull up your Explorer window and copy the path each time into here or navigate to it manually and then you can save your images there alternatively you could also open everything up if you want a nice bigger View and open by clicking open original and opening it in your web browser and then from there you can right click save as save image as and it's going to remember your download location maybe save you a bit of time plus it gives you a you know you can zoom in zoom out and get a nice better look at what you're working with here however works a little bit differently if you're working with the bot now Bots do not have the ability to create Discord threads which we're going to talk about in a minute if you're unfamiliar we'll cover it and so you're really going to have to leverage search based on the terms you used for your prompt so I can say for example computer and it's going to find all the tagged images with that and just make sure you're saving them out as you go because if you start having to scroll back a ton like I often do because I will generate a bunch of prompts on my phone and then come back to the computer and I'm like holy crap that was like 10 pages of prompts becomes harder to keep up with so when possible save as you go but also a big thing I recommend for both of these steps your own private server which we'll cover in a minute or DMS is dismissing any messages that aren't needed so for example that one said job completed dismiss and then we have some down here about failed jobs and things like that job started these don't disappear on their own they're not useful but if you're trying to scroll back a ton Discord gets really laggy once you start scrolling back super far if you just dismiss these as you go or dismiss any missing ones that you forgot as you are scrolling up to reference older images you're going to save yourself a little bit of headache and scrolling time not having to deal with that and having it clog up your feed so then from there you can keep track of your images save them to your folder and things like that which we are going to do here because I am actually using this for my example project so we have the grid you could actually make a folder in your folder Organization for the grids as well or you can just put them in your roughs so for example I'm going to I'm actually going to open all of these in original and I'm going to move this browser window off of this monitor so it doesn't keep popping up so we can move a little bit more quickly here uh so we're gonna open original I don't usually keep Discord and maximize so that's a helpful tip as well as that will keep you from having to see everything and I'm going to upscale that to Max I apparently didn't do that and of course I am mixing Max and light up scales which we will talk about how to do in a little bit I'm just going to go ahead and open all these images in my browser so I can save them all out individually now some of these will be redundant and so I'm actually I'm hurting myself here if you are for sure upscaling an image like for example this is a light upscale which means it doesn't preserve a ton of detail uh or doesn't add a bunch of detail to it rather there's no point in Saving this image because the upscaled max version of that image will be identical other than higher resolution and mixing that in doesn't help but I do save my Max and my detailed upscales for some blending that we'll talk about in a future video if I haven't covered that already but I will just go in here open all my images real quick that one was not done yet don't fall into that trap I always do if it's not done don't save it yet because it's about to change this one's done I can upscale that one to Max it's not done yet I'm going to give everything a minute to process actually while that's processing I can just show you what I'm doing here so these are all the images I have opened so I can right click save image as and then we can start navigating to our folder structure which for me is j a i art projects computer dreaming and then I'm going to start sorting by selects now it doesn't tell you in the file name or anything whether they're upscaled Max or not and so you'll have to track that on your own if you're interested in doing that personally for this project I'm not actually doing that and so I am just going to delete these folders I don't personally want them it was just my example to you you will also be able to view the image's literal dimensions and sides to figure out which one's higher as if that gets a little confusing I can show you that in just a sec once Explorer stops freaking me out freaking out by me saving or deleting folders in a place that you're normally not supposed to okay so this is my Keepers folder I'm for sure keeping all of these as keepers uh oh yeah because I selected a folder that I've been deleted save and so I will start saving all of these images real quick here and once you have completed that then you will have all of your images in their appropriate folders and mostly be good to go I saved one in the wrong spot here so I will move it I will move it to the right location and then again again as I mentioned if you're in Windows Explorer I believe it's the same it's the same thing just navigating to it will be different in Mac or Linux but there's the details pane which will show you the resolution that your files are at and obviously the biggest one is the most upscaled but light and other types of upscales will show up a little bit differently if you don't have that go to view this is Windows 11 but it's mostly the same on Windows 10. you got details pane windows 10 has the little ribbon at the top but same idea so now we have our folders organized what about when you complete a project I want to talk about that before we move to the private server I would actually recommend having a separate folder so like this is my AI art projects folder I would recommend having a separate folder in your drive wherever for completed projects so this would be a i art project archive this would just be completed projects that I've posted that I'm done with I'm not going to edit anytime soon but I want the assets there to come back to later and then from here I would sort by year at the least you could sort by year and then by month if you get super crazy with it that ends up being a little too granular for me just because I don't really care what month a project was made myself I just want to find it by name you could do by year then buy like release projects so like if you have a shop and then a social media page and you have different projects for each one so like my footage archive I will show you real quick here for your YouTube videos I have by year and then in the year I have the different Outlets that they might be posted to so I have footage archives just for Family Video in general but then I've got my epos box YouTube channel my patreon my lost Saves YouTube channel nebula patreon Etc and then from there it is just the individual video projects so again you really have to consider how you want to use it and you can probably change it over time I've changed my archive projects you know over time but for at least for this I want to say we're going to start by year so I'm going to do 2022 and then I would paste my completed project folder in here that way I have the assets anytime I need them ready to go all right thus far we have covered file organization and how to some minor tips on using the Discord bot or yeah the Discord bot for mid-journey win one-on-one chatting with it for organizing your clips and of course you can add your own reactions here so obviously there are certain reactions that have a certain impact within mid-journey like envelope will then DM you the seed and things like that for your image but if I for example want to start using the sunglasses Emoji for ones that I want to keep and come back to later than when I'm scrolling up I'm more easily able to find it but you can't really search for uh Emoji in the search bar so you're not going to have much luck with that but that's something you could do but there's a third way to interact with the mid Journey bot that if you're a paid user I'm 100 recommend you doing because it's otherwise you know there's no additional costs and not from Discord or mid journey and it's super easy to do and that is to make your own private server for it so I'm obviously in way too many Discord servers over here but you can make your own and so I'm going to make a new one to show you this and then I'm actually going to hopefully be able to give you a template or otherwise you copy exactly what I did for this kind of thing so we're not going to start with one of these templates because that's not going to apply so I'm going to say create my own for me or my friends we're going to call this Addy's analog musings you can upload a picture so you know what it is whatever we're just going to create it for now it's going to add it to the top of your list and then you have the ability to make channels there's text channels and there's video channels or voice channels rather there's also Channel categories so real quick I'm going to back out to my main I know this is a lot breathe take it with me I'm gonna take you step by step here I just want to show you an example real quick of what this looks like in action this is my main Discord server for my primary YouTube channel where we have I know it's a lot people often say it's a lot but we have a lot of users we have like 10 000 users so we have different categories for channels so we've got content and notifications and that's for my YouTube videos our free downloads we offer news articles things like that we've got General chats for creators capture card talk Tech help General chat but then we have gaming specific ones that you can you know you can show hide them over here for gaming specific stuff image specific stuff like AI photography things like that all the way down to a bunch of secret stuff so you have the categories that help you organize that are separate from your servers because your servers are just individual I mean it's like a forum a website treat them as individual websites as like a building if we're if we're branching the analogy out to a building the the servers are just different buildings or different floors of a building I guess Discord itself would be the building so or yeah I'm not going to make this more complicated I'm terrible with analogies the the Discord itself would be a building and then each of these servers are floors on that building so then the categories of your channels here the groupings of them would then be the individual no see the floor part works out better yeah I'm gonna stick with it so redoing this whole analogy I know this is not helping you but it might help someone Discord itself is like an office Park of a bunch of buildings and then individual Discord servers are buildings within that Office Park and then the individual Channel categories are floors on those buildings with the individual channels where you can have different things uh are the different rooms on those floors I hope I hope that helped someone so I already made one for like my inspiration board my mood board since I use Discord for everything I already had a server for this but I made a fatal mistake in my use of it I was making different categories or different channels rather for different types of things I wanted to do so I had one where I was trying to generate ideas to use as thumbnail backgrounds I have one for stuff I'm going to work on for Merch for my threadless shop analog dreams.threadless.com I actually just got at the time of recording my first sticker sample and and it is perfect this thing turned out beautifully so I got lots of other cool stuff coming but I had M1 for that one for General Graphics design ideas for making wallpapers or stream Graphics or something and some sticker ones but I didn't organize it from there and you can actually do a lot better of a job organizing your Discord text channels than I have because immediately I started this like two weeks ago and it's already impossible to find stuff that I did not finish yet because at least for me I'm constantly trying to generate new ideas and work on new ideas so I'm going to make this new server we started from scratch and show you how to avoid my problem so first and foremost going back to what we just talked about your categories let's start there if you're only doing art on like a hobby level for like a couple things or whatever you don't need to really do categories you can just do text channels but if you're doing a bunch of different projects if you're an artist that does merch and and and personal work and client work and things like that you want different categories for it so I am going to right click in this empty space and choose create category this is going to be merch generation uh merch ideas we're going to say ideas create category now there are no channels in this category yet we'll make those in a minute we're gonna make a new one create category client work this is going to be for stuff we do for paid projects we're gonna make one more category we're gonna call this personal projects now I'm going to go ahead and delete these first ones because they are not necessary I'm going to drag our text one into merch ideas and we're going to rename it so I'm going to right click it edit Channel and rename it so under merch ideas then of course there's just like think about it like our file structure our project folder structure we just did under merch ideas what other types of things are you doing not individual projects we'll get to that but types of things so for example t-shirt ideas rug ideas sticker ideas those kinds of things so I'm going to say stickers as our first chat and then I'm gonna make a new one and call it t-shirts make sure you're making text channels you probably don't need a bunch of voice channels since mid-journing isn't voice based yet then we're gonna make one for rugs and one for Prince and then under client work I'm going to say brainstorming you can also add emoji and things like that emotes to the category and the individual Channel names if you want spaces cannot be used so they'll be either replaced with underscores or hyphens under client Mark brainstorming and then this one you might want to make dedicated channels for specific clients so we'll just say client one and then under personal projects we've got uh what do we want to do for that emotions followed by photography followed by maybe you want to do different genres so like sci-fi and cyberpunk and then eventually when they get other Discord Bots for the different Services you can even make separate categories or separate specific channels for individual Discord Bots and of course you can't forget to include a category for inspiration we're gonna make one called inspo create category and for this we're going to find our inspiration so we're gonna we're gonna call this design ideas and then we want a channel for portraits glitch art landscape wallpapers uh what else do I want Composites and we'll just do an other for now and now you also have one where you can post in external links so for example over here I have a glitch Art inspo Channel in my Discord where I save things from Tick Tock Twitter Instagram all sorts of stuff to reference to take ideas from to deconstruct and figure out how to do if you want to see videos on that kind of thing let me know in the comments I can come over here and paste this in my inspiration glitch Art Channel and I'm organized all right I have turned This Server layout as it is into a Discord template which means you will be able to copy this link and apply it to your server so here I will copy this link it's Discord dot new slash this gobbledygook it'll be linked in the description below this is all web-based you do not have to download anything you can download the Discord client but like nothing I'm giving you you will have to download there's no concerns like that and it even tells you here templates will copy topics or channels and channel topics Rose permissions blah blah I didn't set up Bros I'm assuming you're doing this on your own but it won't copy the messages which means we can't do the threads I'm going to tell you about in a minute I can't set that up for you but I can at least set this up for you copy the URL and then go back to your web browser paste in that link hit enter and what it's going to do is it's going to open Discord and prompt you to make a new server based on that template and then it shows you the channels and things like that that it uses which is pretty cool so if you haven't made a server yet click create otherwise continue to the video if you just want to see how I'm doing this from there you of course need to add the mid Journey bot to your server in order for it to do anything and if you didn't know you could do that you can't again you need to be a paid user you only get like 10 images for free anyway so head on over to the mid Journey Discord server the one with the little sailboat find any message with the mid Journey bot here it is green text for me it may not be for you click on its name and then click add to server it may ask for you to log in to verify your identity something like that we're going to go over here choose a server choose the one you just made or want to add it to add these analog musings is the one I'm going to add here and click continue now you can customize permissions for the bot so for example you can tell it to not be able to do certain things but then it's kind of going to break like all of these are required functions of the bot so don't don't do that but you can see here as of right now mid journey is already used in almost 200 000 servers that is wild they just introduced the ability to add a servers at the time of recording like a month ago all right authorize yeah it's gonna ask you to either do a captcha or to type in your two-factor authentication if you have that for Discord we're good with just the captcha we're authorized now we go back to the server and in the first channel it says Hey the mid Journey bot is here and you can right click and delete that message if you don't want it taking up space and you can view it in your user list at the top here now you can interact with the mid Journey Discord bot from anywhere in here you can see I just type imagine it starts giving you the prompts to actually do something with it which is really freaking cool you now have your own little Sketchbook here all on your own but we're not done organizing yet you can you can start doing this but if you have specific projects you're working on otherwise I might just make a channel that is scrap for just like raw generation ideas that might be the the the inspo channel for example you might want one like that I'm just going to do a scrap on but once you start working on a project for example my computer dreaming project we just started you're going to want to keep those things together Discord as of early this year late last year introduced a new feature called threads which is like Forum threads email threads things like that where you reply in line instead of just because by default I'll just Spam this channel real quick if I send a bunch of messages it all goes here and all you have to do is scroll up really far or search to find everything which is what we saw with the bot like that becomes a problem after a while with threads you can organize a little bit better so you can actually click here I'll delete this text next to your message icon there's a plus this gives you the option to upload files things like that you can actually choose to create a thread you can do this in any channel so I'm going to choose create thread we're going to call this let's see computer dreaming and then you enter a message to start it that can either be I wouldn't you probably don't want to use your imagine command for that because the bot may not have access to it yet so we'll just say computer dreaming that will create a thread and then you can click here you have it visible over here or it will show up as a sub thread here below your channels and you see the icon changes from the hashtag icon to one with a little chat bubble and now you can view your thread so now I can come in here and say imagine we get the prompt a computer we're going to say a computer's dream and I'm going to do an aspect ratio of 16 by 9 and enter and now we I can continue iterating on this one project this one idea just in the computer dreaming Channel which then means I can then create another thread we'll just call this test you don't have to give them a name but I would recommend it since the whole point of this is organization now foreign by default these threads will Auto archive after 24 hours which means I feel like my capture card is really low frame rate by default these threads will Auto archive after 24 hours which means they will disappear from here but you'll still be able to search and find them so for example if I'm back in the scrap section I can search for computer dreaming and once it indexes your search of your channel it will show that you created the thread and you will still be able to access it it just doesn't stay kind of pinned over here on the left now you do have the ability to extend that duration uh by buying the Discord Nitro boosts and boosting your server up to level three but that requires well you can do it at each level but each level requires multiple boost switches a lot of money to spend by yourself each month uh for your own private server if you're in a big Community server that you just make private channels in or something then everyone can contribute like my my server is that level three boost right now I'm pretty sure uh oh no we're at level two whatever it's kind of annoying when you're trying to do this for yourself for that to not last forever but it it's mostly fine and then from there for example I can say these are actually kind of cool I'm an upscale one and two I'm gonna get a variable on four we're gonna go over here to this one not bad I'm gonna upscale number four I'm gonna get a variant of number one and these aren't clogging each other up so I can continue to keep all of my projects separate and organized and when I need to go back to them instead of scrolling endlessly or trying to find a specific prompt in a sea of similar prompts and upscales over upscales I can just go to the individual thread or search for the individual thread and much more easily navigate through my project this is a lifesaver and that's why I wanted to record this video before I even started the rest of the series that I could get finally transition to this workflow with myself because I've had it outlined and waiting on me for a while I do hope all of this has been helpful for you because I think especially as someone who personally has ADHD and struggles with organization in general organization is incredibly important to actually finishing projects and making cool projects with your art especially with AI art especially with the being an iterative process where you're doing a bunch of upscales doing a bunch of variants and trying to narrow your prompt down and all that staying as organized as possible is super important I'm going to impart you with one little bonus tip for people who made it to this far in the video and that is with regards to your project files and that is too in each individual project file maybe even in the keepers folder right click do whatever you would normally do to make a new text file and call this prompts or successful prompts and the prompts that are turning out and you can do this separately for prompts for seeds whatever the prompts that are actually successfully turning you the exact image that you want that you want to iterate on copy it including any variables you know extra arguments paste it in here and just keep a running log of the prompts that are working for you that way you can come back and iterate on them and again if you were unaware if you add a reaction with the envelope the mid-journey bot will DM you a seed for that specific image which you can then use to reference for other ones so we can actually do the whole uh job ID thing here and paste that in there as well keep a running log of this stuff so if you come back and say you forget about it for a week and finally come back to it and want to iterate on it you can more easily kind of tackle your thought process and what you had already figured out instead of just kind of running through it all over again like I said I do hope this has been super helpful if it was hit that like button it helps a lot let me know a comment down below with whatever questions you have about the workflow of AI art all right my the whole point of me making this channel is to make the tools more accessible and easy to use for you that way your ideas your Visions your message carries through without being limited by the technology and literally my entire Online Career is dedicated to making technology more accessible and helping you figure it out so if you got questions we'll be able to answer them otherwise subscribe to the analog Dreams YouTube channel check out my threadless shop for Merch and the cool stickers and things like that like I talked about and I'll see you in the next episode playlist links to the whole course will be in the description down below as well so go check out the other episodes if you want to keep learning this awesome stuff

Channel: analog_dreams

Views: 24,215

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Id: JFxqu-ERbpA

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022