parameters — --v and --niji
More than half these prompts never say which model made them
A prompt without a version is not a recipe, it is a snapshot of a default that has since moved. Forty-eight of eighty-five are in that state — including some of the best ones.
Every Midjourney prompt runs against a specific model. You can name it with --v 7, or reach for the illustration-tuned line with --niji 6, or say nothing and get whatever your account is currently set to.
Saying nothing is by far the most common choice here, and it has a cost that is easy to miss because it is not visible on the day.
- 48of 85 prompts pin no version at all
- 29pin version 7
- 7use --niji 6, all of them Concept Art
- 1still pins --v 6.1
| Model | Images | With --sref | With --raw |
|---|---|---|---|
| not specified | 48 | 23 | 11 |
| --v 7 | 29 | 26 | 9 |
| --niji 6 | 7 | 6 | 0 |
| --v 6.1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
What an unpinned prompt actually promises
A prompt with no --v does not mean "any version". It means "the version this account happened to be set to when it ran". That is fine while you are working and corrosive afterwards, because the default moves — Midjourney ships a new model and every unpinned prompt silently starts meaning something else.
So more than half of the prompts in this collection are, strictly, not reproducible. They will still make a good picture. They will not necessarily make that picture.
--niji 6 is a different model, not a style
Seven images use --niji 6, and every one of them is Concept Art. Not one is photorealistic, architectural or a texture study.
Every --niji 6 image in the collection. The line is tuned for illustration and anime, and the subject matter follows it.
Two practical consequences show up in the data. First, none of the seven uses --raw — the niji models do not accept it, and adding it fails silently rather than erroring. Second, six of the seven carry a style code, and those codes were found under niji: they are not portable back to --v 7 with any expectation that they mean the same thing.
old village --niji 6 --stylize 250 --sw 80 --sref 4114080079 --profile obus7c1
Notice how much is being pinned in that one line — the model, the style code, the style weight. That is a prompt written to be run again. Six of these seven also set --sw 80, which the style-weight guide covers.
The one prompt still on 6.1
A single image pins --v 6.1. It carries no style code and no --raw:
This is the honest argument for pinning. That prompt still produces what it produced, on a model two generations old, because it says which one. Every unpinned prompt from the same period does not.
What to do
- Pin the version on anything you might rerun. One flag. It is the difference between a recipe and a memory.
- Always pin it alongside a style code. The code and the model are a pair; a code without its model is half a reference.
- Do not port codes across model lines. A niji code and a
--v 7code are not interchangeable, even though they look identical — both are just numbers. - Pick the line by subject, not by taste.
--nijifor illustration and anime; the main line for everything else. The split in this collection is total, and that is not an accident.
Every prompt referenced here is on its own page with its full parameter list, so you can check which of them pinned a version and which did not.