Midjourney Personalization (--p) and Moodboards Explained

What personalization is

By default, Midjourney applies its own house aesthetic to every image. Personalization swaps some of that general taste for yours. Midjourney learns what you prefer from your choices, builds a profile, and applies it when you add --p to a prompt.

The effect is usually a shift in mood rather than a dramatic change: the colours, lighting, composition and level of detail you tend to pick start appearing more often. Two people running the same prompt with their own personalization will often get noticeably different results.

Personalization is tied to your account. Each profile has a code, and you can use your own or another profile’s code by adding it after --p. Check Midjourney’s docs for the current details of how profiles and codes are managed in your version.

How ranking and liking trains it

Your profile is built from your preferences. On the Midjourney website you can rate pairs of images, choosing the one you prefer, and like images while browsing. Those choices are what the profile learns from.

To build a profile that is actually useful:

1. Choose honestly. Pick the image you genuinely prefer, not the one you think is "better art".
2. Be consistent. If you want a profile for moody photography, do not also like every bright cartoon you see. Mixed signals produce a muddled profile.
3. Give it enough data. A handful of choices is not much to learn from. Midjourney asks for a minimum number of ratings before a profile is ready, and more ratings generally make it more reliable.
4. Test and revisit. Run a few familiar prompts with and without --p. If the shift is not what you want, keep rating.

Your taste may differ by project. That is where moodboards come in.

What personalization will not do

• It will not fix a weak prompt. It changes taste, not understanding. Subject, setting and light still have to be described.
• It will not reproduce a specific image or style exactly. It is a tendency, not a template.
• It will not keep a character consistent. For that, see our guide to consistent characters.
• It will not override everything else. Strong descriptive styling in your text, or a style reference, can outweigh it.

Moodboards: defining a look on purpose

A moodboard is a personalization profile built from images you collect, rather than from pairwise ranking. You gather pictures that capture the look you want, such as your own work, generations you like or reference photography you have the right to use, and Midjourney builds a profile from them. You then apply it with --p and its code, like any other profile.

Moodboards suit project-specific looks: a brand campaign, a game’s art direction, a book cover series. Some habits that help:

• Curate tightly. Images should agree with each other on palette, light and texture. Ten consistent images beat fifty scattered ones.
• Vary the subjects. If every image shows a car, the moodboard may push cars into your results. Mix subjects that share the same look.
• Keep one moodboard per look. Separate boards for "warm editorial" and "cold sci-fi" are easier to control than one combined board.
• Name them clearly. You will forget which code is which.

Using --p in prompts

Add --p at the end of your prompt with your other parameters. Without a code it uses your default profile. With a code it uses that specific profile or moodboard.

• a quiet bakery at dawn, flour in the air, warm light through the window --ar 4:5 --p
• a lone cyclist on a coastal road, wide landscape, late summer --ar 16:9 --p
• product shot of a matte black water bottle on a concrete plinth --ar 1:1 --p --raw

To see what your profile is really doing, run the same prompt with and without --p and compare the grids side by side. Repeat with two or three different subjects before drawing conclusions. Fixing a seed for both runs makes the comparison fairer, because the starting point is the same and the profile is the main difference.

Personalization vs style references

Both change the look of your images, but they work at different levels:

Use --p when you want your images to feel like yours without specifying a style each time. Use --sref when a brief needs a particular look reproduced reliably. You can also combine them: a style reference for the defined look, with personalization nudging the remaining choices towards your taste. If the two clash, remove one and compare.

One caution: because personalization changes as you keep rating, results from the same prompt can drift over time. For client work that must match months later, a fixed --sref code or a dedicated moodboard is more predictable than your evolving default profile.

Doing this faster with Dreamdrive

Dreamdrive keeps the full prompt with every capture, --sref code included, so a look you liked is a search away in your Library.