Collections & Curation

Collections & Curation

Projects keep your work organized by where and when it was created. Collections let you organize by purpose — pulling the best results from multiple projects into curated groups designed for a specific goal.

When to Use Collections vs. Projects

The distinction is straightforward:

• A Project is an operational container. Everything you generate happens inside a project. It controls where files live on disk, how the Gallery filters results, and how your work is structured day-to-day.
• A Collection is a curation layer. It groups selected images from anywhere — across projects, across time — into a set that serves a specific purpose.

Use projects for doing the work. Use collections for organizing the results of that work into something presentable or usable.

Here are some examples:

Creating a Collection

1. Open the Collections section from the sidebar (or access it from the Gallery context menu).
2. Click New Collection and give it a name that encodes its purpose and stage:
   • client-a-portrait-shortlist-round2
   • environment-styleboard-fog-variants
   • portfolio-landscapes-2026
3. Start adding images — browse the Gallery, select the ones you want, and add them to the collection.

The Review and Curation Loop

Collections work best as living sets that you refine over time:

1. Add promising new outputs — After a generation session, pull your strongest results into the relevant collection.
2. Remove obvious misses — If something doesn't hold up on a second look, take it out.
3. Compare your top picks — Open images from the collection in the viewer and flip between them to find your best.
4. Mark your final set — Use keep/discard within the collection to narrow down to your final selections.

Tip: Do your curation in two passes. The first pass is generous — add anything that catches your eye. The second pass is strict — cut everything that doesn't hold up under scrutiny. This two-pass approach is faster and produces better shortlists than trying to be perfect on the first round.

Populating a Collection

There are several ways to add images to a collection:

• From the Gallery — Select images in the Gallery (single or multi-select) and use the "Add to Collection" action from the context menu.
• From the Image Viewer — While inspecting an image, add it to a collection directly without going back to the Gallery grid.
• During generation review — When reviewing completed runs in the generation feed, add standout results to a collection as you go.

Tip: Adding images during generation review — rather than going back later — captures your fresh impression of what's working. You're more likely to spot the best variants right after generating them than when scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails a week later.

Using Collections for Delivery

Collections are natural containers for client deliverables, portfolio submissions, or input sets:

Client shortlists

Create a collection for each review round. Name it clearly (client-a-round-3-picks) so you have a history of what was shown and when. When the client gives feedback, create a new collection for the next round rather than modifying the existing one — this preserves the record of each review cycle.

Portfolio sets

Curate your best work across all projects into a single collection. Update it regularly as you produce new work. Having a standing portfolio collection means you can always pull up your best without hunting across dozens of projects.

Input pools

Build collections of images you want to reuse as inputs for future generations — style references, control images, texture samples. Then pull from the collection in Prompt Studio using gallery-to-input reuse. This is especially useful for img2img and ControlNet workflows where having a curated set of source images matters.

Keeping Collections Useful

A collection that grows without curation eventually becomes as hard to navigate as the Gallery itself. A few habits keep them sharp:

• Set a size target. A "best 10" collection forces you to make real choices. Unbounded collections drift toward "everything decent."
• Review periodically. As your skill and standards improve, images that were strong last month may not make the cut today. Refresh your portfolio and shortlist collections regularly.
• Archive instead of delete. If a collection's purpose is complete (client signed off, project shipped), rename it with a "done" or date suffix and start a new one for the next round.

Note: Collections reference images — they don't copy them. Moving or deleting the original image from its project will affect the collection too. If you need a durable archive, export the images from the Image Viewer separately.

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