From the archive

DALL·Ery GALL·Ery, 2022

If an old link brought you here, this is why: dallery.gallery has retired, and its web address now points at this site. This page preserves what was there — including, in full, The DALL·E 2 Prompt Book.

What it was

For a few months in 2022, dallery.gallery — DALL·Ery GALL·Ery — was a guide to making pictures with DALL·E 2, the image generator OpenAI released that April. Access was by invitation and waitlist for most of the year, so prompt technique was folklore, traded between the people who had it. The site collected that folklore into guides: how to get access, how to phrase a prompt, which artists and cameras and lighting terms the model understood. It was made by Guy Parsons, who now edits this site.

It was a short, strange season, and it ended quickly. OpenAI invited a million people off the waitlist that July; Midjourney opened its beta on Discord the same month; in August, Stable Diffusion published open weights, and image generation stopped being something you needed an invitation for.

The DALL·E 2 Prompt Book

The site's best-known artefact: an 82-page visual guide to prompting DALL·E 2 — photography terms, art styles, lighting, framing, and how to combine them — published free in July 2022. It is preserved here exactly as published (v1.02), a period piece from the summer it describes; the model it was written for was later superseded by DALL·E 3.

Read it full-screen on PitchDownload the PDF (22 MB)

The articles, as they stood

The rest of the site was guides and prompt collections. Nothing has been updated since 2022 — they are period documents now, kept by the Internet Archive exactly as they were:

What happened next

Everything after that summer — the diffusion boom, the styles, the lawsuits, the models that made an 82-page prompt guide unnecessary — is the story this site exists to tell. Start with 2022, follow DALL·E 2 through the record, or begin at the timeline.