7 things I’ll tell my best friend, who is just getting started with Midjourney

Tips for thriving in the fascinating world of Midjourney

Get a free email alert when a new story is published.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. — Albert Einstein

Midjourney is your creative partner, not a tool. /imagine prompt: an award-winning documentary photograph of a man and a robot working in harmony together to paint an artwork, futuristic, color — style raw — ar 16:9. (All images were created with Midjourney by the author.)

Colten, my bestie, is overjoyed with the images he created with Midjourney. He recently signed up for the Standard Plan and has been hooked on image creation ever since. He knows I’ve been using Midjourney for a while and wants to know my tips for getting started.

Here are the seven things I’ll say to him:

Stay organized to make your Midjourney experience more enjoyable and less chaotic. /imagine prompt: a documentary photograph of Humans and robots organizing photo archives — ar 16:9

(1) Stay organized

It’s tempting to create one image after another; before you know it, you’ll have thousands of images scattered everywhere.

Take a break from image creation and make a rough plan for managing your creations. Make folders to organize your images based on categories, dates, or whatever makes sense to you.

Here are some tips to help you stay organized:

• Set up a private server to manage your image files. This is the most critical skill to master for a more enjoyable and less chaotic Midjourney experience. For more information, read this story.
• Before renaming files, always make a backup of the original names. The Job ID is included in the default file names, which is useful when interacting with Midjourney.
• Keep your favorite images, prompts, keywords, inspiration and learning notes, YouTube links, and other resources in one location for easy access.
• Some Midjourney fans prefer to use Notion to keep track of everything they’ve learned. I prefer Microsoft OneNote at the moment because it supports OCR (Optical Character Recognition), which means that if I paste a screenshot of an image containing its prompt, seed number, and Job ID, I can search for these details even though the information is embedded inside the image. It’s convenient for me.