How to Run Stable Diffusion Locally – step-by-step guide

Let's get you started with installing Stable Diffusion

A step-by-step guide on running stable diffusion locally.

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Attention all AI newbies – here’s how to run Stable Diffusion locally. Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image model, powered by AI, that uses deep learning to generate high-quality images from text. If you want to run Stable Diffusion locally, you can follow these simple steps. This will let you run the model from your PC. Keep reading to start creating.

Running Stable Diffusion Locally

Stable Diffusion is a powerful tool with many potential applications, such as art, design, and entertainment. With Stable Diffusion, you can generate realistic and detailed images with high fidelity to the text input.

By running Stable Diffusion locally, you can experiment with different text inputs and generate images that are customized to your specific needs. You can fine-tune and train the model on your data, leading to even better results.


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Running Stable Diffusion locally is a simple process that requires only a few steps. By following these steps, you can generate high-quality images from text using deep learning.

It’s worth noting that in order to run Stable Diffusion on your PC, you need to have a compatible GPU installed. For a minimum, we recommend looking at 8-10 GB Nvidia models. You’ll also want to make sure you have 16 GB of PC RAM in the PC system to avoid any instability. 

Step

1

Install the Required Software

You must install Python 3.8 or later on your computer to run Stable Diffusion. You need to install PyTorch, a popular deep-learning framework. Install PyTorch using pip, the package installer for Python, found on the official Python website. For PyTorch, you can use the following command: “pip install torch torchvision torchaudio.”

Step

2

Download the Stable Diffusion Repository

Next, you need to download the Stable Diffusion repository from GitHub. You can do this by navigating to the Stable Diffusion GitHub page and clicking the “Clone or download” button, or and executing the ‘git clone’ command in the terminal. You can then download the repository as a ZIP file and extract it to a folder on your computer.

Step

3

Install the required Python Packages

Once you have downloaded the Stable Diffusion repository, you must install the required Python packages. You can do this by running the command “pip install -r requirements.txt” in the Stable Diffusion folder.

Step

4

Prepare the Text Input

You need to provide text input to generate an image using Stable Diffusion. The text input should describe the image you want to generate.

For example, if you want to generate an image of a cat, you could provide the text input “A brown cat with green eyes is sitting on a blue sofa.” You can save the text input in a plain text file.

Step

5

Run Stable Diffusion

To run Stable Diffusion, open a command prompt or terminal window and navigate to the Stable Diffusion folder.

You can then run the following command:

python inference.py –text_file /path/to/text_input.txt –output_dir /path/to/output_folder

Replace /path/to/text_input.txt with the path to your text input file and /path/to/output_folder with the path to the folder where you want to save the generated image.

Step

6

View the generated image

After running Stable Diffusion, you can view the generated image in the specified output folder. You can open the image using any image viewer. You can adjust the image quality and resolution by modifying the command line arguments in the “inference.py” file.

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Stable Diffusion system requirements

To make Stable Diffusion work on your PC, and to allow it to work at its full potential, it’s definitely worth checking out the system requirements. Here are the system requirements, as listed per the official Stable Diffusion website.

  1. You will need Windows 10/11, Linux or Mac operating system.
  2. An NVIDIA graphics card, preferably with 4GB or more of VRAM, or an M1 or M2 Mac. But if you don’t have a compatible graphics card, you can still use it with a “Use CPU” setting. It will unfortunately be slow, but it should still work.
  3. 8GB of RAM and 20GB of disk space.

Conclusion

Stable Diffusion is an exciting development in text-to-image generation, and running it locally is a great way to explore its capabilities. This deep learning model can generate stunning images that impress you with a few simple steps. After you have installed the software on your PC, you can read about how to write stable diffusion prompts to get your creative journey started.

Give it a try today and see what you can create! For more inspiration, check out our guide to Stable Diffusion here.