ChatGPT Endless Canvas

🆓 Burns zero Codex / API quota

An infinite-canvas image board that generates through the ChatGPT web app you already pay for — no API key, no per-image billing, and none of your Codex quota.

中文文档 →

An infinite-canvas image board powered by the ChatGPT web app — no paid API. It drives your own logged-in chatgpt.com session over Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to generate images, and streams every result onto a local pan/zoom canvas with Lovart-style iteration tools:

• 🎨 Infinite canvas — pan, zoom, drag cards, layouts persist per board
• ✏️ Annotate → Regenerate — draw a box/point on an image, write a revision note, hit regenerate; the server re-prompts ChatGPT with the original attached as reference
• ⭐ Style-reference generation — use any image on the board as a style anchor and generate new subjects in the same look
• 📋 Scheduled batches — submit a prompt list; jobs are queued with a random 30–120 s pause between them (human-ish pacing, avoids rate limiting)
• ⚡ Parallel generation — up to 3 images generate at once (BOARD_WORKERS), each in its own dedicated ChatGPT tab; every job records its ChatGPT conversation uuid, and interrupted jobs recover their image from that conversation on restart instead of regenerating
• 🌳 Lineage tracking — every generated image records its parent and the notes that produced it; the canvas draws the family tree (solid = edit, dashed = style reference)
• 🗂 Multiple boards — each board is a plain, portable directory (images + layout.json + annotations.json + lineage.json)
• 📥 Drag & drop — drop local images onto the canvas to bring them into the workflow
• 🌐 Trilingual UI — switch the board between 中文 / English / 日本語 right from the toolbar (remembered per browser)
• 🤖 Claude Code skill included — let Claude submit prompts, batches, and edits to the board for you

The board server is stdlib-only Python; the generator needs just pip install playwright (no browser download — it attaches to your Chrome).

How it works

board.html  ──►  board_server.py  ──►  generate_chatgpt_image.py  ──►  Chrome (CDP :9222)
 (canvas)         (queue, boards,        (send prompt + reference,        └─ your logged-in
                   lineage, uploads)      wait, download final PNG)          chatgpt.com session

No API keys, no cookies to copy: you log into chatgpt.com once in a dedicated Chrome profile; the tool reuses that session. Generated images render in the assistant reply as progressive frames — the script waits until the stored-file URL settles (and excludes any image that existed before the prompt, so stale results from earlier chats can never be grabbed).

Quick start

git clone https://github.com//chatgpt-endless-canvas.git
cd chatgpt-endless-canvas

# 1. one-time: install playwright into a venv (no `playwright install` needed)
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

# 2. launch the debug Chrome, log into chatgpt.com in it, keep it open
bash launch-chrome-debug.sh

# 3. start the board (idempotent; survives the terminal via nohup)
bash start.sh                      # prints the actual url (8090, or next free port)

Data lives in ~/Documents/chatgpt-endless-image-gen/ — boards.json is the board registry; each board directory is self-contained and portable.

CLI generation (no board)

.venv/bin/python generate_chatgpt_image.py \
  --prompt "a cozy cabin in snow, watercolor" \
  --output out.png \
  [--reference style.png] [--timeout 240] [--grab-only]

--grab-only re-grabs the newest image already on the ChatGPT page — useful when generation finished after the script timed out.

HTTP API

Claude Code skill

skills/chatgpt-image/SKILL.md teaches Claude Code to run the whole loop — check Chrome, start the board, submit prompts/batches/edits via the API, and report results. Install:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r skills/chatgpt-image ~/.claude/skills/

If you cloned somewhere other than ~/Workspace/chatgpt-endless-canvas, set CHATGPT_IMAGE_GEN_HOME=/path/to/clone in your shell profile (the skill falls back to the default path).

Configuration

Limitations & notes

• ChatGPT’s web UI changes often; selectors in generate_chatgpt_image.py are defensive but may need updating after redesigns.
• “Edit” is a full re-generation guided by the reference image + zone-worded notes — not true in-place inpainting.
• Back-to-back generations can trip ChatGPT’s silent rate limiting (prompt sent, no reply). The batch scheduler’s random pauses exist for exactly this reason.
• Use with your own account, for personal purposes, at your own risk. Automating the ChatGPT web app may conflict with OpenAI’s Terms of Use.

License

MIT