About Ideogram

Ideogram is a general-purpose online image generator somewhat similar to DALL-E 3, only with a few more features. When you use it for free, you are limited to 20 generations per day, with each generation giving you four images based on a prompt. Free use gets slower generation times, often with an extra delay of about a minute, but is still well worth trying.

There isn't an app, but you don't need one. Visit Ideogram on your phone, log in, and press the + button to type a prompt. The entire process seems to work well on their mobile site.

Prompt adherence is quite good. Ideogram will proceed through a complex prompt and include most of what you ask for in the resulting images.

Ideogram advertises good support for text within images, and it is pretty good, but not perfect. When prompted for a candy shop with the words "CANDY SHOP" painted on it, it spelled "CANDY SHOP" correctly in 7 out of 8 images. Prompting for a logo for "ORIGINALSIN.AI" was less successful, with many of the output images changing or omitting letters (see the metallic logo below.)

The lighting in some of the images looked very flat, as if it were illumined by an on-camera flash that flattened all of the forms (examples below.) Even adding "Side-lit, lit from the left" to a prompt didn't completely fix this. {Continued below break.}

Three aspect ratios are supported. Square images will give you 1024x1024 resolution. Wide-screen images drop to a lower resolution of 1280x720, and vertical images are 720x1280. You can download clean .jpeg files without any logo or watermark when using Ideogram for free, and you can download .png files for (slightly) higher quality with a paid subscription. A paid subscription also unlocks 2x upscaling for more detailed, higher quality images.

Ideogram's "Remix" is what some interfaces call "Image to Image" or "img2img." It lets you take an image you've just generated and have it creatively regenerated based on a prompt. You can edit the original prompt when you Remix an image or replace the prompt altogether. I took an image I had just generated of a beach house with a bike path near it and Remixed it with the prompt "Expressionistic oil painting, bold colors, magical day."

There's a slider for "Image Weight" that lets you determine how much the image will contribute to the final generation, so you can balance the contribution of the image with the contribution of the prompt. At different Image Weight settings, I went from a slightly different version of my beach house image to wildly abstract images that only had a similar composition to the image I'd started with. It's a great feature that adds greatly to what you can accomplish with Ideogram.

Prompts and images are filtered by Ideogram to make sure you don't generate any images with nudity or other inappropriate content. If an image might have contained anything inappropriate, it is replaced by an image of a cat holding a sign that says, "MAYBE NOT SAFE."

Content limitations are the same for free image generation or the paid subscription. They do not seem to be hyper-active, though. I did not find many prompts blocked by mistake, which seems to happen more often in some other online services.

Paid subscription levels start at Basic for $8 per month (when billed monthly) and let you generate more images, with faster image generation speeds. Paid users also get the Ideogram editor, which lets you crop or paint into an image before you Remix it. Another new feature unlocked with paid membership is the option to generate self-tiling images, a handy option you might be used to from Automatic1111 which is missing from most online image generators. In addition to standard tiling texture maps, the tiling function in Ideogram supports other options including brick-like patterns of repetition, where each row of repetitions can be offset compared to the row below it.

Moving up to the Plus level for $20 per month (when billed monthly) also unlocks the option to upload your own images, which you could transform with the Remix tool. Plus level subscribers can also set their images to be Private, so that they are not shared with other users like the images from Basic and Free users.

Ideogram is a new service, and it hasn't added inpainting or outpainting yet, but the general direction of development seems to show that Ideogram wants to include tools for graphic designers and other artists to be able to refine and control their work.  If you wanted something like DALL-E 3, but with more creative tools and options available, then give Ideogram a try.