Survey of 60+ image generators: retrieval, not capture, is the real pain point

shivam_dewan · reddit · 2026-09-14

Three months after asking how people relocate specific old generations from 1000+ outputs, the author summarizes 50+ replies and introduces Picteus, an open-source local indexer for generation libraries.

Key findings:

Capture isn't the problem: workflows are embedded in PNGs; nobody needs a prompt saver.
Nine people had nine homemade systems (folder trees, renames, JSON saves, subgraph templates, CSV batching) — none satisfied.
The real friction is retrieval: memory plus scrolling breaks once the library grows.
When recipes are lost, people reconstruct: vision models/WD taggers can approximate the prompt but model, LoRA stack, seed and sampler are unrecoverable.
Many are forward-only: with models improving fast, old work isn't worth preserving.
Those with real pain all had a durable asset: a fixed character, a client look, an expensive-to-reshoot pipeline.

Picteus is open-source, runs locally, uploads nothing, and indexes existing output folders (workflows included) to make libraries searchable. The author is recruiting 5 heavy users to test it in exchange for custom workflow extensions.

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Survey of 60+ image generators: retrieval, not capture, is the real pain point

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