TL;DR: This article raises the question of whether CivitAI needs galleries or a separate space for drafts — high-quality image variations that, for one reason or another, didn't make it into the main gallery.
I love CivitAI. I really do. The ability to build your own little community around your work, the developers' willingness to keep improving the platform and listen to its users, all its bugs, glitches, and new features — I genuinely like all of it. But one idea mentioned by the developers some time ago got me thinking.
I'm talking about private galleries, where images wouldn't appear in the main feed or search results. The developers were asking the community whether such a tool would be useful, clearly targeting creators who produce buzz-driven content. For this kind of "hidden" gallery, though, I could think of only one use case as someone who isn't trying to monetize their work: a draft gallery.
Image generation produces a lot of junk, and most of it isn't worth keeping. Many creators here don't bother with much curation and sometimes upload an entire generation session as a single post, simply increasing the number of images in their galleries. In a way, this makes sense: the more images you have, the higher the chance of getting feedback in the form of buzz or reactions. That approach is perfectly valid, and I'm not criticizing it.
I take a different approach. From each generation session, I pick one, two, or three of the best images, and only those make it into my gallery. I've come across other creators here who work in a similar way, so I know I'm not the only one.
Most of the images from a session get deleted, but there are usually a few that remain sitting in a folder. They're just too good to throw away. Maybe they're not quite as good as the ones that made it into the gallery, but they still evoke something. Others might not be as striking or as polished as the final picks, but they still have something to them.
The problem is that they often come from the very same idea, prompt, or setup as an image I've already posted. So I can't really put them in the gallery without feeling like I'm posting variations of the same thing over and over again. And yet, these images still work. They're not necessarily as good as the ones that made the cut, but they're good enough to stand on their own — they just don't have a place in the main gallery anymore.
Of course, this doesn't happen after every generation session. Sometimes there are no "leftovers" worth keeping at all. But when there are, I end up with a handful of these perfectly usable images that are too good to delete, yet don't really have anywhere to go. And that's where I don't really know what to do with them.
I've had a couple of ideas, like creating a Telegram group or a channel/forum structure on a Discord server. But all of these solutions move the discussion outside CivitAI and, in a way, pull the community toward another platform. That takes away some of the "centrality" of sharing and discussing creative work here: if you don't have an account there, you're left out; if you do, now you have another place to keep track of.
I don't want to turn my gallery into a dumping ground, but I also don't want to create additional accounts just to have somewhere to put these images. That, once again, dilutes the whole idea of community — only this time, it happens within CivitAI itself. I don't want to spend my time and effort remembering which account I used to post something, which account I had a conversation with someone on, or where exactly I had a particular interaction. I want my creative work and my interactions with the community to stay in one place.
If you have the same problem, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Maybe we can discuss it and, who knows, come up with a solution that works for all of us.