Locations
Location entities -- properties, media, and profile.
A location is a place where scenes occur. Locations are project-level entities reused across episodes. They have a Location level of their own in the sidebar: its first row, All locations, is this page, and under it sit the pages of one location -- Media, Properties and Profile. The breadcrumb at the top of the page names whichever location those pages are open on.
Click New location to create one. Supply a name; a short ID is suggested from it, and you can edit it before confirming.
In a shot's Properties view, under Cast & Setting Assignments, assign a location to a shot (inheritable from the parent scene). The location's starred media image is then available as an input to operations that generate the shot's background.
Cards, list and looks
One control at the right of the controls row chooses how the page is drawn, and it has three settings: Cards, List, and Looks. Whichever you pick is remembered for next time, and Characters, Locations and Props each remember their own.
Cards is what you get to begin with -- a grid of pictures, which is how you recognise a location at a glance. List is the table, and it is the only place the In this episode column appears. Looks shows the same assets with their looks nested underneath.
A card shows the location's picture with its name underneath. You never choose that picture: it is the starred image from that location's Media gallery, or the newest image in it when you have not starred one. Star a different image and every card follows at once. A location with no images shows a plain card.
Cards carry the same star and "..." menu as the rows, in the same places as a media gallery card: star on the left, menu on the right.
Media
The location's Media Gallery holds generated backgrounds and reference imagery. Star the images you are happy with. The one picture that IS the location is its reference image (below); where there is none, the starred image is used as the reference background when running shot composition operations that reference this location.
Mark the one image that IS this location with Set as reference in the item's ... menu -- the Assistant uses it whenever a request needs this location's likeness. See the reference image.
A location can also carry an identity LoRA -- this place trained into a small add-on file, so a model draws the same room every time. It is uploaded into the look's gallery and applied on any run whose shot is set here, exactly as a character's is; see Identity LoRAs.
Operations
Operations are picked from Choose an operation in the location's Media Gallery. These are the ones you reach for most on a location; the gallery offers the full set.
Location reference image
Fill in the location's properties, then open its Media view, press Choose an operation and pick a text-to-image operation. Press Write prompt on the prompt's heading and a model-tuned prompt is written from the properties, the visual style and the model's own advice, and placed in the prompt box for you to read and change. Run it and the result lands in the gallery ready to star. To run on your own computer, pick a model whose files you have installed locally and switch the run target to Local.
Properties from an image
The reverse journey also works. Add an existing photo or piece of concept art to the gallery and pick Image to Text (Gemini): a vision model describes it and the description lands in the gallery as a text item. Extract Properties from Text then turns it into proposed values for the location's Appearance properties, which appear at the top of the Properties page for you to accept or reject one by one. See working backwards from an image you already have.
Properties
Location properties are grouped into cards, in this order down the page:
| Card | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Core properties | Name, description and notes |
| Story properties | Narrative context, location type, story function, spatial constraints, character interaction opportunities, emotional narrative tone, and continuity notes |
| Appearance | Visual summary, environment type, architectural and structural style, layout and depth, scale and proportion, surface materials and textures, dominant shapes, colour palette, lighting design, shadow and contrast, atmosphere and environmental effects, state and condition, key set elements, and identity preserve rules |
On a look only Core properties and Appearance are shown: a look is a visual variant of the same location, so it does not carry its own story. Appearance starts from the base's values and you override only what differs.
Profile
The Location Profile provides a rich document workspace for reference material -- written descriptions, mood boards, notes. Use this for anything that helps define the look and feel of the space.
Looks
Locations support looks for different versions of the same space:
- Time-of-day looks (morning interior vs night exterior)
- Weather or season looks
- Story-state looks (before and after an event)
A look's Properties page shows only Core identity and Appearance -- Story properties belong to the base location and are edited there. See Looks for how this works.
One location or two?
A common question: a TV studio has a news desk at one end and a weather wall at the other. The backgrounds are completely different, but it is one room and one continuous scene. Does that need one location or two?
Work down this list and stop at the first answer that fits.
Location directions, if only the dressing changes. Same place, same background, but different lighting, weather, time of day, or set dressing for one shot. Nothing new to create -- write it in the shot's Location directions, and it feeds the generation prompt for that shot alone.
One location with looks, if it is one place that appears several ways. The news desk and the weather wall are two looks of one Newsroom. This is usually the right answer. The Story properties -- what the newsroom is, what it means to the show -- stay in one place on the base location, and each look carries only its own Appearance properties and its own starred background image. Renaming or re-describing the newsroom updates every look at once.
Two locations, if they are genuinely different places. A newsroom and a rooftop are two locations. There is no shared story context to keep in sync, so there is nothing to gain from tying them together.
A location can also simply hold several images in its Media Gallery and you pick between them. That works, but a gallery has no way to say which image belongs to which shot: star them all and every shot is offered every background, in the order you starred them. A look ties one background to the shots that mean it. Prefer looks.
Changing location part-way through a scene
You do not have to split a scene just because the background changes.
A scene has a location, and every shot in it uses that location by default. Any shot can set its own Location instead, which applies to that shot only -- so the newsroom scene can cut from Julie at the news desk to Sally at the weather wall and back, all inside one scene, one screenplay heading, and one continuous run of dialogue.
The shot's Location control has two parts: the location, and which of its looks to use. So the cut above is the same Newsroom location throughout, with the shots at the weather wall set to the weather-wall look.
Leave a shot's Location unset and it inherits the scene's -- the control shows Inherit from scene with the scene's location named, so you can always see what a shot will use. When a scene's shot list is drafted from the screenplay, shots are assigned locations and looks from what the screenplay describes; check them afterwards on each shot and adjust any that guessed wrong.