What Is Midjourney? How to Use This AI Image Generator

Midjourney is one of a handful of generative AI tools that turn plain-language text prompts into images and short video clips. These AI tools can be enormous time savers for small businesses that need images to market their products. 

Men’s accessories retailer Ridge uses custom AI to mass-produce ad creative, then runs only the strongest through paid campaigns. “We generate 500 static ads per day automatically,” CEO Sean Frank says on the Shopify blog. Even if only 10% of those images are good enough to test in-market, that’s still around 50 fresh ad variants a day, letting Ridge test more creative than any human design team could produce.

Here’s how AI image generators like Midjourney work, and how you can use them in your business.

What is Midjourney?

Midjourney is a generative AI tool that turns natural language prompts into images and video clips, letting you generate everything from simple line drawings to photorealistic, painterly, cinematic, surreal, and other aesthetic styles. Describe a scene—its style, lighting, composition—and Midjourney AI produces multiple image options matching your prompt, which you can then refine.

Shopify’s image-generation options include Tinker by Shopify and Sidekick. Other AI image generators include Google’s Nano Banana, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Craiyon.

Since it was introduced in 2022, Midjourney has evolved, now offering a web interface that makes it easier for non-designers to use, and adding features such as the ability to animate still images, render readable text, and create personalized profiles that match your aesthetic preferences.

You can use Midjourney in a variety of ways:

• Marketing and advertising. AI tools like Midjourney can generate product mockups, visual ideas for marketing campaigns, banner ads, and social media graphics.

• Branding and identity. Midjourney can generate concept art, packaging ideas, mood boards, and logos, applying a consistent motif across all of them.

• Catalog and product visualization. Midjourney’s ability to create realistic images makes it useful for quickly generating lifestyle shots of products used in different settings, or creating variations for seasonal campaigns. 

• Blog and social content. Image generation tools like Midjourney let you create custom illustrations for blog posts or thumbnails for videos and podcasts without hiring an artist or licensing stock images.

• Interface and product design. Using generated images lets you quickly brainstorm visual directions or product concepts before committing to one.

What to consider before using Midjourney

Midjourney offers controls for style, lighting, composition, aspect ratio, and other parameters, and lets you generate variations of an image. Before subscribing, consider its cost, workflow, accuracy, ownership rules, scalability, and tendency to produce similar-looking final output.

Midjourney allows you to produce professional-quality images almost instantly, with a high level of stylistic control, then iterate until you land on the final output you want. It tends to produce more polished, art-directed results than general-purpose tools, requires no artistic training, generates images in a wide range of styles, and can save significant time during the concepting and prototyping stages of creative projects.

But like other AI image generators Midjourney comes with caveats:

Cost

Unlike ChatGPT and Nano Banana, which let you create a limited number of images for free, Midjourney is entirely subscription based. Plans range from Basic ($10 per month) to Mega ($120 per month), differing mainly in how fast generation you get, whether your images stay private, and how many jobs you can run at once. Any business making more than $1 million in annual revenue has to be on the Pro ($60 per month) or Mega plan.

Weigh that against AI tools like Tinker by Shopify, which generates images and videos from a simple text prompt with no separate subscription.

Effort

Generated images are rarely perfect the first time. Image quality varies hugely, and AI tools still routinely introduce errors—garbled text, extra fingers, warped details, and other visual hallucinations. Human review is essential, and you should expect a fair amount of trial and error.

Accuracy

Unlike commercially safe AI tools designed to work with licensed content, Midjourney can’t reliably reproduce images of real products with the right colors, logo, or text in place. It’s well suited to mocking up a product catalog, but to work with real photos, you may need another tool. 

Shopify Magic Media Generation lets you edit your existing product images directly from within the Shopify admin—changing the background, lighting, or setting from a text prompt—rather than generating new, potentially inaccurate images from scratch.

Ownership

Intellectual property issues around AI images remain murky. The US Copyright Office says purely AI-generated material isn’t protected by copyright, although human-authored elements of works created with AI tools may be. Review the report and Midjourney’s terms before using generated images commercially.

Depending on your subscription tier, your images may also be available to other users. By default, Midjourney creations are visible on its website. Pro or Mega Plan subscribers can use Stealth Mode to keep them private.

Scalability

Because Midjourney lacks batch processing or application programming interface (API) capabilities, even users on the Mega Plan can’t process more than 12 jobs at a time. Every image must be handled manually, limiting the tool’s usefulness if you need to quickly generate high volumes of artwork.

Shopify businesses have a couple of free, commerce-native alternatives worth trying first. Tinker by Shopify is a free mobile app with more than 100 AI tools, while Sidekick generates images directly in the Shopify admin.

Sameness

While Midjourney lowers the barrier to entry for creating visuals, that ease is a double-edged sword. Jaz Fenton, co-founder of Otherhalf Studio, warns that unless you prompt meticulously, you’ll end up with generic, highly similar designs that feel homogenous and are easily identified as AI-generated. 

“People are really quick to identify: This is AI. Someone didn’t make this,” Jaz says on Shopify Masters. 

At its worst, using AI-generated images could break your customers’ trust. Otherhalf Cofounder Jamil Bhuya compares it to finding a fake review. “People crave authenticity and that human connection. … As soon as someone recognizes that these are fake reviews, they feel betrayal and anger toward that brand where it’s like, ‘Hey, you broke my trust. You’re out.’ I think that’s gonna be the feeling that people have with AI. 

How to start using Midjourney for ecommerce

• Using Midjourney on the web
• Using Midjourney via Discord
• Midjourney web interface vs. Discord

To use Midjourney, first sign in using a Google or Discord account. After authenticating, you’ll be prompted to choose one of Midjourney’s four subscription plans. There’s no free trial, but you can explore a free gallery of images created by other users and view the prompts used to generate them.

The next step is to choose which interface you want to use. Midjourney has two options: a web interface or the Midjourney Discord Server. The two offer mostly overlapping functionality, with some key differences:

Using Midjourney on the web

With the web interface (midjourney.com), start by clicking Create in the left hand menu and typing a description of the image you want to generate in the prompt bar at the top of the page. For example: “Otter floating on its back in a swimming pool.” A pull-down menu to the right of the prompt bar lets you adjust aspect ratio, resolution, visual style, and other settings.

A few moments later, Midjourney will display four side-by-side visualizations of the prompt you typed. Select one, and Midjourney gives you the option to introduce variations or create a five-second animated clip of the image. 

You can then tell Midjourney to zoom out, pan to expand the image outward, or select a region of the picture to edit using the app’s built-in image editor. When you’ve arrived at the version you like, you can upscale the resolution and download a copy.

Using Midjourney via Discord

After logging into your Discord account, add the Midjourney server. Select Add a Server (the + sign) from the left hand menu, then Join a Server at the bottom of the pop-up window, and then type “discord.gg/midjourney” underneath Invite link. 

Inside the Midjourney server you’ll select a room (like “newbies-2”) or a channel. In the prompt window at the bottom of the chat thread type “/imagine,” followed by a description of the image you want to create. Midjourney then displays a two-by-two grid of images matching your prompt. 

Buttons below the grid labeled U1 through U4 let you quickly upscale a particular image. Other buttons labeled V1 to V4 let you generate four variations of the image.

A key difference from the web interface is that you use text commands to indicate aspect ratio, resolution, visual style, and other parameters. For example, to create the otter image above using a portrait aspect ratio (2:3), standard resolution, and an extreme visual style you’d type: “/imagine otter floating on its back in a swimming pool --ar 2:3 --sd --s 800.”

Midjourney web interface vs. Discord

Midjourney has more than two dozen parameters for controlling images in both the web and Discord interfaces. But the web interface also provides a Photoshop-style editor that lets you fine tune or erase parts of an image, add additional visual layers, create custom aspect ratios, and use other tools unavailable in Discord.

The web interface makes it easier to upload reference images—visuals you’d like Midjourney to emulate in terms of type, visual style, and objects. Character reference and style reference images are key if you want to create logos or mascots in Midjourney and need to maintain consistent styles or characters across images.

Power users familiar with Midjourney parameters may find Discord’s text commands faster and more efficient than the web interface. And only Discord lets you combine parameters that are frequently used together, like a specific aspect ratio and image quality, into shortcuts known as option sets, further speeding image creation. Once created in Discord, these shortcuts can also be applied using the web interface. Images built using Discord can be opened in the web editor for fine tuning or remixing.

How to create effective prompts in Midjourney

Knowing how to deliver the right instructions is what makes AI tools like Midjourney useful, notes Lindsey Carter, founder of athletic clothing brand SET Active. 

“It’s all in the art of the prompt,” she says. “If you don’t know how to prompt AI correctly, it’s not going to shoot out what you’re looking for.”

Here are some Midjourney prompt basics:

• Keep it short and simple. Lengthy or overly detailed prompts may confuse the model more than help it.

• Be as specific as possible. Instead of “big” use “enormous” or “gigantic.” Instead of “cats” use “three cats,” or name a particular breed.

• Focus on the important stuff. Add specific details for things that truly matter—like subject, environment, or mood—and let Midjourney handle the rest.

• Use parameters to fine-tune your prompts. If there’s something you want to leave out, use the “--no” parameter, followed by any elements you want to exclude. For example, if you want an image of a fruit basket that doesn’t contain apples or bananas, you’d use the prompt basket “filled with fruit --no apples, bananas.” If you wrote “basket filled with fruit but leave out apples and bananas,” Midjourney might still include these elements.

• Let reference images do the heavy lifting. Showing Midjourney how you want the final output to look can avoid a lot of trial and error.

How to organize projects and iterate on concepts in Midjourney

Midjourney’s web app gives you several ways to organize your work that aren’t available on Discord, where the images you’ve just generated can be hard to find within a busy chat session. Here are the key tools for organizing your Midjourney creations:

• Folders. As with files on your computer, you can use folders and subfolders to organize images by project, date, drafts, concepts, or virtually any other criteria.

• Search and filters. A search tool lets you locate images based on words used in a prompt, date created, type of image, or specific parameters. Or you can use the filter sidebar to group images by attributes, like aspect ratio or resolution.

• Permutations. This Midjourney command lets you generate multiple variations of an image from a single prompt, using curly brackets around the different versions. For example, the prompt “a {red, green, blue} logo” produces three sets of logo images, one for each color. This lets you quickly compare competing concepts, and works the same in both Discord and the web interface, but the number of available permutations is limited by your subscription plan.