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What does Seed mean in Midjourney Ai?
“The Midjourney bot uses a seed number to create a field of visual noise, like television static, as a starting point to generate the initial image grids.â€
Midjourney generates seed numbers randomly for each image, but you can specify them with the –seed or –sameseed parameter.
Why is the seed number important?
If you enter the same prompt several times into Midjourney, the bot would create different results each time. But if you use the same seed number in the prompt, the results would be the same.
So, using the same prompts and seeds in Midjourney will create identical images.
This way you can test the impact of small changes to your prompt because your images will look more consistent.
This is very important for prompt engineering because you want to know which parts of your prompts are influencing your picture.
Important! According to Midjourney “Seed numbers are not static and should not be relied upon between sessions.â€
Let’s have a look at using Seeds in action.
Here is an example of my prompt:
Street Portrait Stockphoto of a diverse group of smiling 30-year-old friends walking together outdoor, location is Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, orange lighting, Fujifilm X100V –ar 3:2 –seed 2234340624 –v 5
And this is a variation with blue lighting:
Street Portrait Stockphoto of a diverse group of smiling 30-year-old friends walking together outdoor, location is Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, blue lighting, Fujifilm X100V –ar 3:2 –seed 2234340624 –v 5
While the images look similar, they are not identical. Using the Seed doesn’t guarantee the creation of a consistent character in your prompt. How to do this will be the topic of one of my next posts.
You might be curious to see, how the result would look if I don’t use the same Seed number. Let’s have a look:
Street Portrait Stockphoto of a diverse group of smiling 30-year-old friends walking together outdoor, location is Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, orange lighting, Fujifilm X100V –ar 3:2 –v 5
The differences between the two results would be much larger if we would change a more important command in the prompt. Still, we see that the style varies a lot from the first two pictures.
It’s important to mention, that Seeds don’t guarantee the same results when carrying the composition of your prompt. However, using seeds will help you to stay closer to the original. Rerolling a prompt without seeds always comes with the danger that the result will be totally different.
How to find the seeds of your images in Midjourney?
The Midjourney Bot will send you the Seed and the Job ID when you react to the image with an envelope emoji.
So, click on the emoji in the upper right corner and select the envelope (or type in “envelope†to find this emoji).
Right after that, a message by the Midjourney bot should appear in the left sidebar. Click on it to see Seed and Job ID.
Finding the Seed on Midjourney V5
If you are using Midjourney v5 in the past you might have noticed that you can’t find the Seed for individual pictures anymore. Seeds still worked in v5, but only when you used the grid mode (the 4 preview pictures)
However, it looks as if this issue was resolved. Now, getting the seed functions exactly as with the previous versions of Midjourney
When to use seeds in Midjourney prompts?
1) Creating a consistent character
Check out this Twitter Thread by Nick St. Pierre explaining how to create consistent characters in Midjourney.
2) Building a prompt
Your prompt should work reliably and you need to make sure that it only includes commands that are in fact influencing the pictures. The only way to guarantee this is by using the  — seed command for visualizing the impact of your changes to variables and syntax.
My Midjourney-related projects
- Discover Midjourney Mastery! Immerse yourself in the comprehensive Midjourney course on Skillshare. Gain a deep understanding of the Midjourney process, refine your skills, and achieve remarkable results: Join my class on Skillshare and get 1 month of Skillshare free.
- Create better prompts with my Midjourney Prompts Generator for Notion
- Check out my best prompts on Promtbase.