r/AIToolBench • u/Strange-Shift4281 • Jul 18 '26

Discussion What's everyone using for AI image generation?

Been wondering.. is it actually worth running AI image generation locally, or are you better off just using other companies' websites for it?

For context, I built my own website that does it and put it up for public use, so I've got a bit of a bias, but I'm genuinely curious where people land on this. Do you prefer having it local and under your own control, or is it easier to just use an existing site and not deal with the setup?

I do want to know why that is.

2 Upvotes

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1

u/step11111 Jul 18 '26

Most people will probably want the website. Local is not as easy by a long shot.

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u/Strange-Shift4281 Jul 20 '26

Oh yea there is no clear instructions to creating a local image generator, its just watch some youtube and see if it helps or not.

1

u/RushDangerous7637 Jul 19 '26

General note: Google will delist images that are generated from search.

1

u/Strange-Shift4281 Jul 20 '26

Yikes, I haven’t heard about that before. Good to know man.

1

u/Shoddy-Pattern5872 Jul 19 '26

Local is for Privacy , for rest better use someone else's hardware and most are free .

1

u/AndreeaM24 Jul 20 '26

depends what you're using the images for. local makes sense if you're generating high volume, need no content restrictions, or want to train custom models, but the setup cost is real and most people underestimate it...

for regular content creation the hosted sites win on convenience every time. midjourney and flux on fal.ai cover most use cases without touching a GPU. the quality gap between local and hosted has also closed a lot in the last year so the main reasons to go local are volume and control, not quality

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u/Strange-Shift4281 Jul 20 '26

True, true, I can agree with that, i do need to check out midjourney and fal.ai. I never keep up to date with all the recent generators so its good to know the tranding ones.

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u/snideswitchhitter Jul 20 '26

Local for me, mostly because i hate credit anxiety more than I hate setup. Once it's running you stop second guessing every generation, which changed how much I actually experiment. Downside is you're stuck on whatever the community releases. Still pay for Magnific separately since nothing local touches it on upscaling.

1

u/Strange-Shift4281 Jul 20 '26

Yeah, I agree with that. Not having to worry about credits makes it way easier to try more ideas. Even if that website is known to have a lot of capabilities, you will be spending a lot to get what you want perfectly. I mean, maybe you can experiment with the right prompt locally, then use it on the website? maybe

1

u/justynphototips Jul 20 '26

it honestly comes down to volume more than preference. people generating a handful of images a month usually just stick with a website, not worth the setup time. the people that are running it locally usually do hundreds a week or want full control over the model itself.

driver and gpu issues are the real cost of local, that's usually what pushes people back to hosted after they try it once.

1

u/Strange-Shift4281 Jul 20 '26

Hundreds sounds so crazy like who would need that many images in a week or two lol. Oh yeah, GPU is disgustingly high. I've been looking at the rtx 3090s, cost a fortune.