Installing

Installing

The download

The app is about 47 MB. It installs for your user only — no administrator prompt, and nothing is written outside your own folders.

Windows will show "Windows protected your PC" the first time. ImageForge is not code-signed: a certificate costs money every year and buys reputation with Microsoft's SmartScreen rather than any actual safety. Click More info → Run anyway if you are happy to.

Every release publishes a latest.json with a SHA-256 hash, so you can check what you downloaded:

Get-FileHash .\ImageForge-0.1.16-win64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

The image engine

The engine is about 5 GB more, and it is not included. Which build you need depends on your graphics card, and an installer cannot know that in advance.

Open ImageForge, go to System, and it offers the engine. It says what it will fetch and why: an NVIDIA card gets the accelerated build, anything else gets the processor build with a warning that renders will be much slower. It does not refuse either way.

On a mid-range NVIDIA card the install takes about four minutes.

What you need

Windows	10 or 11, 64-bit
Graphics card	An NVIDIA card is strongly recommended. 8 GB of card memory is comfortable; 12 GB is plenty
Disk	~5 GB for the engine, plus model weights — these get large, see Where your files live
Account	None
Internet	For the engine and for downloading models. Rendering itself is offline

Without an NVIDIA card the app still installs and runs, on the processor. Expect a render to take minutes rather than seconds.