Storing and Deleting Generated Results: Practical Hygiene

Generation produces many files fast, and without organisation an archive becomes a dump of hundreds of variants in which nothing can be found. A few simple habits solve it.

Why a service is not an archive

Generation history inside a service is convenient but unsuitable for long-term storage for several reasons: files are removed after a retention period, access depends on an account, and terms can change.

A practical rule: anything worth keeping is downloaded immediately. Service history is a workspace, not a repository.

What is worth keeping

1. Final results in use or likely to be needed.
2. The source photographs they came from.
3. The request text that produced a good result: the frame will not repeat, but the direction is reproducible.
4. One or two rejected variants: a month later the choice sometimes turns out differently.

What to delete

• Obvious failures: artefacts, botched attempts, technical errors.
• Dozens of near-identical variants: keep the best and one spare.
• Intermediate versions once the final is approved.
• Results containing other people's faces, once the task is finished.

Archive structure

A workable scheme is simple: a folder per task or per date, containing subfolders for sources, results and finals. A text file with the requests alongside.

File names are better made meaningful immediately: in six months a name like "generation_2026_08_31_final_v3" says nothing, while "portrait-business-grey-background" says a lot.

Deleting from the service

Once what you need is downloaded, results in the service can be removed. That is sensible for two reasons: less data sits outside your control, and the history stays clean.

This applies especially to images containing other people's faces: once the task is done, remove them from the service and from your own archive if they are no longer needed.

Backups

A standard consideration remembered after a loss: a generation archive belongs in your general backup scheme alongside photographs.

Lost work cannot be recovered: even a saved request produces a different frame, not the same one.

Keeping the requests

A separate practice that repays fastest. A good formulation gets reused in other tasks, and over time a personal library of working descriptions accumulates: light, backgrounds, styles, processing.

A text file with the description next to a link to the result suffices. In a year it will be the most valuable file in the archive.

Timescales

A practical approach: review the archive once a year. Delete what was never needed, keep what is in use, restructure for current work.

Without periodic clearing an archive grows faster than anything useful can be found in it, and it stops serving its purpose.