We’ve talked a lot about Midjourney, and made no secret of our use of that service to generate art for articles.  We love it!  But one thing has really ground my gears since the service launched.

First, it’s the Discord-only interface.  It’s like they had enough funding to build their GPU clusters and then ran out of money when it came time to build the interface, so they just hooked up a Discord bot and let it go at that. The Discord interface works fine but it’s a painful workflow.

There’s also no API (somewhat famously – people have been asking for it for more than a year) and to use Discord, you have to learn a lot of flags and commands.  MJ did put a stub in their web UI where you could get your API keys…but you can’t do anything with them.  Meanwhile, there are all kinds of third-party services hacking up APIs that on the backend talk to Discord…it’s pretty ugly.

So there’s a ton of demand for an API or at least a better interface, but MJ seems to be sitting on its hands.

Fortunately, others are not.

Leonardo is here.

Leonardo provides a web-based interface for image gen, a pleasant history of your projects to scroll with, and…well, it’s everything you wanted from Midjourney but couldn’t get.

For starters, everything in Leonardo is web-based.  You don’t have to learn Discord, or configure your own Discord server and Midjourney bot.  You can free all that mental RAM you’ve been using to remember obscure Midjourney flags and delete those PDFs with all those tricks.  What Midjourney does by “command-line,” Leonardo does by GUI.

Leonardo offers many different models to play with.  Cinematic, portrait, graphic design, anime, etc. are all available, with many sub-choices and refinements.  You can do some of this is Midjourney by saying “in the style of” but it’s wordy and requires references.

There are also lots of creature comforts, such as a single click to remove backgrounds.  Indeed, I find the entire Leonardo interface quite pleasant, as every place I want to copy to reuse or tweak something, there is a button or tooltip waiting.

Did I mention there’s also an app?  And an API?  I wrote a quick Python script to generate a couple hundred images and save each in a file with its seed and it was very easy.

In my experience, Leonardo’s photorealistic outputs are a little better than Midjourney’s, but really the comparison is about the interface.  I doubt there is really anything that Leonardo can do that Midjourney can’t.  But the process is so much more pleasant with Leonardo!

Leonardo has a limited free trial so give it a try.  Maybe it’ll light a fire under the Midjourney dev team?

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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