Free AI generative fill - IOPaint (Lama Cleaner) - Install guide

[kn4ll]

Made this in the /a/ scanlation thread, but figured I could post it here as well, since it's a somewhat cumbersome program to install, at least if you're as tech illiterate as me.

I can make an easy guide. This is for windows, but should probably be relatively similar for other OS.
First you need to install miniconda. That's easy enough.
https://www.anaconda.com/docs/getting-started/miniconda/main
Don't download anaconda, just use miniconda, anaconda is just bloatware. You can skip the registration.
After installing miniconda, run it. You'll enter an own version of the terminal with miniconda. Then use this command

conda create -n iopaint python=3.12 -y

Then you've created an own environment for iopaint that won't interfere with your other python programs with python 3.12. Then run

conda activate iopaint

To activate the environment. You need to do this when using the program.

You might need to activate paths for python for scripts, I'm not entirely certain if it's necessary when you use miniconda. But for windows it's going to start menu - settings - system - about - advanced system settings - environment variables - path (edit) - (new) C:\Users\(User name)\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python312\Scripts
Of course add your own username instead of (User name) or another path if you installed Python elsewhere.
I checked and this doesn't seem to be necessary with miniconda.

Then install iopaint with

pip3 install iopaint

Then to use it, write

conda activate iopaint

to activate iopaint environment, then

iopaint start --model=lama --device=cpu --port=8080

to run iopaint (might want to change model and device after what you want to do, pytorch and torchvision should be automatically installed so you might want to switch to cuda), and then open

http://localhost:8080/

in your browser like chrome or firefox.
The manga module is inferior to Lama, don't use it.

You can use

conda env list

to list your conda environments if you forget their names, and you can use

conda env remove --name <environment-name>

Where <environment-name> in this case would've been iopaint if you wanted to remove it, like if you'd want to reinstall it or something.
You can also deactivate your current environment with

conda deactivate

if you have something else you want to work with.

Edit: Also even if IOPaint seems to download pytorch and torchvision, it doesn't seem to work using cuda instead of cpu. So most likely you need to install them in advance. Doesn't matter much for lama, but if you want to use other modules like stable diffusion, it'll be way too slow with only cpu.