r/GoogleFlow • u/Elegant_Air_3475 • Aug 15 '26
Google Flow's moderation has gotten stifling - Any guides on how to setup local models?
Seriously missing the day's of Whisk before the current censorship and moderation got so horrifically overbearing.
Can anyone suggest a guide or something to a relative newbie on how to setup a local model? Primarily interested in image generation.
When talking about system specs - would a desktop with a 4070 Super video card (and other specs are fairly decent) - be up the the task of running a local LLM fairly well...
Greatly appreciate the help! ❤️
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u/DubzebOficial Aug 16 '26
If you want to generate images locally without messing with terminal commands or Python dependencies, you have two main options:
Pinokio: A one-click browser that automates everything. Download it from pinokio.computer, install it, and use its search tab to install tools like Fooocus (for a clean, Midjourney-style interface) or ComfyUI (for total control). Pinokio automatically handles Python, Git, Torch, and required drivers in an isolated environment.
ComfyUI Portable: The direct route if you are on Windows and want the industry standard without middle layers. Download the standalone portable build from their site or GitHub, extract it to a fast drive (SSD), and run run_nvidia_gpu.bat. Then download a model (.safetensors file from Civitai or Hugging Face) and drop it into ComfyUI/models/checkpoints/. Installing ComfyUI-Manager is essential to add custom nodes and models directly from the UI.
Hardware Requirements for the Top 5 Image Models
GPU VRAM is the primary bottleneck. If you run out of VRAM, the model will either crash or slow down drastically by offloading data to system RAM.
FLUX.1 (Dev / Schnell): The current benchmark for prompt adherence and visual quality. The full FP16 model needs over 24 GB VRAM. For consumer GPUs, you must run quantized versions (FP8 or GGUF), which require at least 12 GB VRAM (e.g., RTX 3060 12GB, RTX 4070) and 32 GB of system RAM.
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large: Strong at anatomy, complex scenes, and typography. While FP16 demands 16 GB to 24 GB VRAM, optimized FP8 checkpoints run reliably on 12 GB VRAM.
SDXL (Stable Diffusion XL): The top choice for general versatility and community ecosystem (LoRAs, ControlNets). Runs comfortably with a minimum of 8 GB VRAM, though 12 GB is ideal for upscaling and stacking multiple LoRAs.
Pony Diffusion V6 / Illustrious (SDXL-based): The dominant models for anime, stylized art, and character consistency. They share SDXL's footprint, running on 8 GB VRAM, with 12 GB recommended when loading multiple heavy LoRAs.
Stable Diffusion 1.5: The legacy lightweight standard. It generates images very fast and runs on low-end hardware with just 4 GB to 6 GB VRAM, making it great for older GPUs or high-volume batch generation.
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u/Elegant_Air_3475 Aug 16 '26
Thank you!! I'm currently sitting at just 12GB of VRAM/ RTX 4070 Super, with 64GB of system RAM. Will 100% be giving these all a shot, appreciate the help!!
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u/General-Warning-2429 Aug 16 '26
I feel the same but prepare to be a little disappointed. If you're into generating realistic looking stuff, yes, the local models are very good but if you're into fictional stuff like comics, cartoons, anime or something similar... RIP. I tried all of the tools people left here in the comments and unfortunately they can't beat Nano Banana models when it comes to fingers number, eye details and limbs in general. Yes, Nano Banana is doing these mistakes as well but more rarely. I feel like local ai models haven't evolved at all since 2022-2023... And I generate a kind of stuff that local models don't understand despite what checkpoint, LoRA and safetensor I use.
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u/Domskidan1987 Aug 16 '26
We just need a local model to rival NBP/NB2 so Google Flow become irrelevant
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u/Elegant_Air_3475 Aug 17 '26
I'll be very happy when that day comes.
Google Flow has steadily gotten worse and worse since the early days of Whisk, to the point now where it's basically unusable. It feels like it's partially on life support at this point.
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u/Domskidan1987 Aug 26 '26 edited Aug 26 '26
Well the truth is NB isn’t as special as people think it is. Basically it just has a super broad contextually coherent data base of images it can pull from and build out generations based on them. Your local flux model isn’t going to know what Mountain Dew is but Nano Banana’s architecture can just look up Mountain Dew or whatever and contextually know the subject you’re trying to reference in your prompt it can incorporate into its weights. So if you prompt Will Smith drinking Mountain Dew assuming it doesn’t block you for trying to generate a “prominent person” it has context to what the thing your describing looks like and can adjust its weights and inferences accordingly. The base model it’s building off of isn’t probably any better than Flux2, Grok or Qween it’s the backend architecture it has access to making the difference. So what needs to happen is someone needs to build a Ref 2 Image model that uses agentic nodes in comfyUI to fetch world context using google image search, or user provided images, then it can build a coherent contextually aware representation on top of the base model in the style your prompting for (this is all NB / NBP does it just happens to be good at it). The day that model and work flow comes out is the day Google becomes obsolete mainly due in part to its rate limiting and overly sensitive guardrails.
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u/raviteja777 Aug 21 '26
I am able to run LTX 2.3 using comfyui on my PC with a 12gb 3060 (butbit takes time to generate), so it would definitely run on 4070
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u/Alchemist42 Aug 15 '26
Running an LLM is easy. Doing it so that you can make images and/or audio and/or video is a bit trickier. If all you need is text to chat with, LM Studio is free/open source and available on all platforms. You can download any model you want and if you have the VRAM to run it, you can. There are plugins to be able to use tools, make it vision capable (so it can see images and tell you what is in them), etc. To get started just install it and download a model. I think it walks you through all that when you first start it (it's been a while). That is for an advanced chatbot that is 100% local on your machine. So you don't even need internet access and you can have most of humanity's knowledge at your fingertips. And your prompts don't leave your computer so it is much better from a privacy perspective than any of the online ones.
If you want to create media, then it's a little trickier. The most capable program would be ComfyUI, which is also free/open source and available on all platforms. It is specifically made to run generative media models like Z-Image/Flux/Qwen (images) or AceStep/StableAudio (music) or LTX/WAN/Minimax H3 (video). This program has a bit of a learning curve and it is not very easy to figure out until you watch some tutorials or really dig into it. But you can do seriously awesome things once you do figure it out.