Group Images with similar generation together

Why?

When viewing the gallery (image search - https://civitai.com/images and https://civitai.com/search/images), I’m looking for inspiration. Dozens of images that look almost identical (but just have a different seed) isn’t giving me new ideas. It just makes the search take longer (and increases the server load unnecessarily).

What to do about it

Group similar images together and show them as one entry in the gallery / search. Ideally, you can show little left/right arrows to see alternatives (like it’s done in some parts of the site already like in the gallery preview at the bottom when you are viewing a lora).

The grouping can be done very simply initially, by grouping images that only differ in their seed. Ideally, the grouping would be smarter than that and group by positive prompt, detecting if only up to 3-4 tags have changed (grouped by user, base model)

For the “main” image (the one that’s displayed at the top of a grouping), you can pick either the one with the most buzz or keep it simple and pick the last image chronologically.

That new view can be an option, so people can collapse to this view or expand to see how they see things now.

Server Impact

You can implement lazy loading on viewing the alternatives (other images in the group)