Name: Seedream 4 Text-to-Image API
Brand: ByteDance

Overview

Seedream 4 Text to Image Description

Seedream 4 is ByteDance’s advanced AI model that unifies image generation within a single powerful platform. It delivers photorealistic images at 2K resolution in about 1.8 seconds and supports outputs up to 4K resolution, enabling rapid, high-quality content creation. The model accepts up to six reference images and can generate up to nine consistent images simultaneously, ideal for batch campaigns and storyboard workflows. It features natural language-driven editing, allowing users to add or remove elements easily without complex inputs, while maintaining strong character consistency. Seedream 4 supports bilingual prompts in Chinese and English, making it accessible for global and localized creative workflows.

Performance Benchmarks

Inference Speed: Seedream 4 Text to Image produces high-resolution images (2048×2048 pixels) in approximately 1.8 seconds, setting an industry standard for fast and efficient generation suited for real-time creative use.
Resolution Support: Supports outputs up to 4K resolution, delivering ultra-sharp, photorealistic visuals with professional-grade lighting, textures, and aesthetics.
Prompt Adherence: Excels at accurately translating complex natural language prompts into detailed visuals that reflect conceptual intent and fine visual details.

Technical Overview

Seedream 4 is built on ByteDance’s next-generation hybrid transformer architecture featuring a dynamic Mixture of Experts (MoE) design. This advanced architecture dynamically allocates computation at the token level, enabling ultra-low latency and high-quality image generation. The MoE layers provide efficient scaling, delivering 2K resolution outputs in roughly 1.8 seconds and supporting up to 4K ultra-high-resolution outputs.

This unified model supports text-to-image generation and batch creation within a single multimodal framework. It handles complex inputs, including natural language prompts, up to six reference images, and video frames, enabling rich multimodal reasoning and synthesis with strong semantic and prompt fidelity.

__wf_reserved_inherit — The model demonstrated exceptional performance in text-to-image generation tasks, consistently achieving high scores across various evaluation criteria including adherence to prompts, aesthetic quality of generated images, and accurate representation of textual descriptions.

API Pricing

$0.0315 per image

Key Features

Natural language-driven editing: Allows intuitive image modifications via text commands without the need for masks or bounding boxes.
Character consistency and detail preservation: Maintains facial features, clothing, lighting, and textures across different styles and images, preventing visual inconsistencies.
Photorealistic image quality: Produces professional-grade visuals with flawless lighting and texture, supporting styles from realistic cinematics to abstract art.
Native bilingual support: Accurately understands and processes both Chinese and English prompts, catering to a global and localized user base.
Context-aware generation: Leverages semantic understanding for context-rich image synthesis, such as infographics or thematic visuals.
Multi-reference and batch generation: Supports up to six reference images and batch outputs up to nine images maintaining coherence.

Use Cases

E-commerce and Marketing: Rapid generation of product variations, lifestyle shots, and advertising visuals with consistent style and identity across campaigns, supporting quick iterative creative cycles.
Storyboard and Comic Creation: Producing coherent sequences of images for artists and filmmakers that enable narrative planning and shot composition without manual frame-by-frame editing.
Interior and Concept Design: Refinement of sketches and photos with lighting, style, and compositional adjustments to create high-resolution renderings suitable for presentations and client approvals.

Fan Art and Illustration: Multi-reference and style-consistent generation allow creation of stylized portraits, anime characters, and collectibles with preserved character identity.
Professional Poster and Infographic Design: High-resolution outputs up to 4K with superior text rendering, layout composition, and precise natural language-driven editing help produce compelling visual assets.
Creative Multimedia Content: Integration of text, images, and videos to generate advertising, entertainment, and e-learning materials with rich semantic alignment.

Code Sample

Comparison with Other Models

vs Gemini 2.5 Flash Image: Seedream 4 demonstrates superior understanding of user intent, producing more accurate and contextually relevant edits. It also outperforms Gemini 2.5 in maintaining character consistency and complex scene detail.

vs Seedream 3.0: Seedream 4 achieves about 35% faster inference speeds and supports higher output resolutions up to 4K. It also unifies generation and editing capabilities into one model, unlike Seedream 3.50 which handles these separately.

vs Flux Kontext: Seedream 4 provides significantly better prompt adherence, image alignment, and text rendering quality. Flux Kontext often produces inconsistent compositions and less polished images.

vs Qwen-Image: Seedream 4 handles complex scenes and multi-object prompts with better accuracy and coherence. Qwen-Image struggles with complex logic and retrieves weaker prompt alignment.

Uptime and performance

Uptime (24h): 100%
Uptime (7d): 100%
Availability (24h): 97.0%
Error rate (24h): 3.0%
End-to-end latency (24h median): 21.5s

Measured on the AI/ML API gateway across live traffic. Figures are medians unless stated. Last updated 2026-10-12.

Use cases

E-commerce and Marketing: Rapid generation of product variations, lifestyle shots, and advertising visuals with consistent style and identity across campaigns, supporting quick iterative creative cycles.
Storyboard and Comic Creation: Producing coherent sequences of images for artists and filmmakers that enable narrative planning and shot composition without manual frame-by-frame editing.
Interior and Concept Design: Refinement of sketches and photos with lighting, style, and compositional adjustments to create high-resolution renderings suitable for presentations and client approvals.

Fan Art and Illustration: Multi-reference and style-consistent generation allow creation of stylized portraits, anime characters, and collectibles with preserved character identity.
Professional Poster and Infographic Design: High-resolution outputs up to 4K with superior text rendering, layout composition, and precise natural language-driven editing help produce compelling visual assets.
Creative Multimedia Content: Integration of text, images, and videos to generate advertising, entertainment, and e-learning materials with rich semantic alignment.

How to use Seedream 4 Text-to-Image API

Install any OpenAI-compatible SDK, point it at api.aimlapi.com/v1, and set the model to bytedance/seedream-v4-text-to-image.

import requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/images/generations",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + AIMLAPI_KEY},
    json={
      "model": "bytedance/seedream-v4-text-to-image",
      "prompt": "A cat holding a sign that says hello"
    },
)
print(r.json())

const r = await fetch("https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/images/generations", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.AIMLAPI_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "model": "bytedance/seedream-v4-text-to-image",
    "prompt": "A cat holding a sign that says hello"
  }),
});
console.log(await r.json());

curl -X POST https://api.aimlapi.com/v1/images/generations \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AIMLAPI_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"bytedance/seedream-v4-text-to-image","prompt":"A cat holding a sign that says hello"}'

OpenAI-compatible — swap the base URL and it works with your existing SDK.