A reasonable amount of training images (50 or so), and then I train for 2,000-ish steps for a new style.
Many of them work well with Flux, particularly if they're illustration-based. Some don't seem to work at all, so I didn't upload those!
I have a MacBook Air so I train using the various API providers.
For training a style, I use Replicate: https://replicate.com/ostris/flux-dev-lora-trainer/train
For training a concept/person, I use fal: https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/flux-lora-fast-training
With fal, you can train a concept in around 2 minutes and only pay $2. Incredibly cheap. (You could also use it for training a style if you wanted to. I just found I seem to get slightly better results using Replicate's trainer for a style.)
I have not used runpod or airgpu, and not affiliated.
Similar deal with Replicate: an A100 there is over $5/hr, whereas on Runpod it's $1.64/hr.
And if you use the "serverless" services, the pricing becomes even more astronomical; as you note, $1/minute is unreasonably expensive: that's over 20x the cost of renting 8xH100s on Runpod's "Secure Cloud" (and 8xH100s are extreme overkill for finetuning image generators: even 1xH100 would be sufficient, meaning it's actually 160x markup).
If you do end up training one on yourself with fal, it should ultimately take you here (https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/flux-lora) with your new LoRA pre-filled.
Then:
1. Click 'Add item' to add another LoRA and enter the URL of a style LoRA's SafeTensor file (with Civitai, go to any style you like and copy the URL from the download button) (you can also find LoRAs on Hugging Face)
2. Paste that SafeTensor URL as the second LoRA, remembering to include the trigger word for yourself (you set this when you start the training) and the trigger word for the style (it tells you on the Civitai page)
3. Play with the strength for the LoRAs if you want it to look more like you or more like the style, etc.
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If you want a style LoRA to try, this one of SNL title cards I trained actually makes some great photographic images. https://civitai.com/models/773477/flux-lora-snl-portrait (the download link would be https://civitai.com/api/download/models/865105?type=Model&fo...)
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There's a lot of trial and error to get the best combinations. Have fun!
I want to make a LoRA of Peokudin-Gorskii photographs from the Library of Congress collection and they have thousands of photos, so I’m curious whether that’s effective for autogenerating the caption for images.
I have a preset in there that I sometimes use to generate captions using GPT-4o.
If you use Replicate, they'll also generate captions for you automatically if you wish. (I think they use LLaVA behind the scenes.) I typically use this just because it's easier, and seems to work well enough.