Seedream 5.5 prompts: write them the way ByteDance writes its own examples

Summary

Write Seedream 5.5 prompts as a short scene description: what is in the frame, how it is lit, what it is made of. Put any words that must appear in quotes, and give every layout its numbers.

The reason is simple: that is how ByteDance writes its own. The Seedream 5.5 model page shows 15 text to image examples, each with the prompt and the image it made. We copied all 15 word for word into our Seedream 5.5 prompt page and measured them with the same tests we use for every model:

• They are short. The median is 417 characters, about 63 words in four sentences. The longest is 536.
• They quote the text. 6 of 15 give the exact words to render, from a newspaper masthead to a Chinese tagline.
• They describe what should be there. Only 1 of 15 says what to leave out. OpenAI’s own examples for GPT Image 2.6 do that in 62% of prompts.

What changed in the model itself? ByteDance’s launch post, dated November 9, 2026, lists three upgrades: multi-turn editing that keeps unedited regions identical at the pixel level for up to 100 rounds, native RGBA images with full and partial transparency, and more lifelike light and skin with clearer small text. A Pro version is announced to follow.

The checklist

1. Call it a photograph and make three camera choices. 9 of the 15 examples call the image a photograph or a snapshot. The white cat in a bar names a low angle, a tilted frame and on-camera flash, then a film stock. Three decisions like these do more than a paragraph of adjectives.
2. Name the textures and the light. 13 examples name a texture, grain or fine detail, and 8 describe where the light comes from. ByteDance says 5.5 renders skin, fabric and materials more naturally, and the prompts ask for exactly that: cream knitted cushions, worn wooden furniture, high ISO grain.
3. Quote every word that must appear, then the type. The Shakespeare newspaper gives the masthead and the headline in quotes, then asks for bold serif headings and legible small type. ByteDance reports a severe text error rate of 0.4% and a minor rate of 1.7% in its own tests, so dense text is a fair request.
4. Set the orientation first. 9 examples open with vertical, horizontal, landscape or a ratio such as 3:4. It is the cheapest line in the prompt and it fixes the composition before anything else.
5. Count the parts of a layout. The blueberry character board asks for four variants, front, side and back views, five expressions and six accessories. The garden infographic names six stages joined by five arrows. Numbers turn a busy layout into a list the model can check.
6. Ask for transparency in words. For RGBA output, the official examples say it plainly: each character as a separate image with a transparent background, or keep the area outside each circle transparent.
7. Edit one thing per round. ByteDance’s demo ran 100 successive edits on one portrait, each from the previous output. Name the single object to change and let the model keep the rest.
8. Describe the scene you want. Where you would ban something, write what fills the frame instead. One official example, a puddle reflection, ends with a line that rules out buildings, people and vehicles; the other 14 manage with positive description alone.

Where to try it: Jimeng in China, Dreamina by CapCut elsewhere, and the BytePlus playground or ModelArk for API access. Higgsfield lists it too; the link on our model page is an affiliate link.

Where the numbers come from

The prompts. All 15 text to image examples on ByteDance’s Seedream 5.5 page, read on November 11, 2026, and stored with their images in awesome-image-video-prompts at commit f3e37fb, credited to ByteDance Seed. The editing and transparency demos on the same page show sequences without a full prompt, so they are left out.

The tests. We ran the feature patterns from our prompt measurements dataset, version 2.0, so every model is measured the same way. The comparison set is the 26 GPT Image 2.6 prompts taken from OpenAI’s image prompting guide, the closest match: one maker’s own examples against another’s.

	ByteDance, Seedream 5.5 (15)	OpenAI guide, GPT Image 2.6 (26)
Median length	417 characters	447 characters
Quotes exact text	40%	27%
Says what to leave out	7%	62%
Labeled sections or lists	0%	19% and 19%
Asks to keep something	20%	31%
Names a ratio like 3:4	13%	0%

The two makers write prompts of the same length. The difference is in tone: OpenAI’s examples often close with a line of constraints such as No watermarks or No extra text, while ByteDance’s examples spend those words on the scene. For contrast, creator prompts on X run much longer: the median for Nano Banana 2.1 in the same dataset is 1,749 characters.

The model claims. Release date, the three upgrades, the 100 round demo, the text error rates, the comparison with GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Nano Banana 2.1, and the coming Pro version all come from ByteDance’s launch post. Those are the maker’s own evaluations on its MagicArena platform.

What to ignore

• Prompt length as a rule. 417 characters describes ByteDance’s examples. A creator prompt of 2,000 characters can work as well; the checklist is about what goes in, and short is a side effect.
• The leaderboard claims. ByteDance says 5.5 leads GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Nano Banana 2.1 in text structure and text to image realism. That is its own test. Until independent arenas rank it, compare on your own prompts.
• Keyword lists. All 15 examples are written in full sentences. Write sentences too, and skip the comma separated tags.

Limitations

• Fifteen prompts. One prompt moves a percentage by about seven points, so read the table as direction, not precision.
• Showcase examples. A maker picks its best results for a launch page. These prompts show what ByteDance expects to work, which is useful, and they come with its best outputs.
• We measured text. This post measures how the prompts are written. Which model draws a given prompt better is a separate test, best run on your own prompts.
• Creator prompts are still coming in. Seedream 5.5 is two days old. Prompts that creators share on X will join the model page as we collect them, with like counts, and we will compare them with these examples then.

Sources

1. ByteDance Seed: Seedream 5.5 model page and examples · official
2. ByteDance Seed: More Realistic Images, More Stable Editing Across 100 Rounds, Introducing Seedream 5.5 · official
3. awesome-image-video-prompts (the collection holding all 15 examples) · blog
4. AgentCraft: AI image and video prompts, per-prompt measurements (dataset v2.0) · blog
5. AgentCraft: Seedream 5.5 prompts, each with its image · blog