Fooocus

// Overview

Fooocus is a free, offline, open-source app for generating images from text. It is built on the Stable Diffusion XL architecture and runs locally on your own machine. Like online tools such as Midjourney, it hides most of the technical settings so you can concentrate on writing prompts instead of tuning parameters.

It is aimed at people who want good-looking images without learning prompt engineering or sampler internals. The installation is short (the project keeps the clicks from download to first image under three), the minimum GPU requirement is 4GB of Nvidia VRAM, and the interface is a local Gradio web UI.

Within the image-generation space, Fooocus sits between bare model runners and heavy node-based tools like ComfyUI. The project is now in limited long-term support with bug fixes only and stays on SDXL; for newer models such as Flux the maintainers point to WebUI Forge or ComfyUI/SwarmUI.

// What it does

• Text-to-image with an offline GPT-2 based prompt processing engine, so short or very long prompts both produce usable results
• Upscale and variation options (Vary Subtle/Strong, Upscale 1.5x/2x) to refine an input image
• Inpaint and outpaint using Fooocus's own inpaint model, plus pan in any direction
• Image Prompt and FaceSwap (via InsightFace) to guide generation from a reference image
• Built-in styles and presets, including run_anime and run_realistic launchers and SDXL models from Civitai
• Runs fully offline with a Gradio web UI and a 4GB minimum Nvidia GPU requirement

// Getting started

On Windows you can use the prebuilt download; on Linux you clone the repo and run the entry script, which downloads the default models on first launch.

git clone https://github.com/lllyasviel/Fooocus.git
cd Fooocus
conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate fooocus
pip install -r requirements_versions.txt

python entry_with_update.py

Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.

// When to use it

• Generate images from a text prompt locally without paying for an online service or sharing your prompts
• Edit an existing image by inpainting, outpainting, or upscaling it
• Create anime or photo-realistic styles using the dedicated presets and SDXL models from Civitai
• Run a face swap or image-guided generation from a reference photo

// How Fooocus compares

Fooocus alongside other open-source image generation tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.