you want categorical class mode almost every time we do the same thing to setup a way to read the validation data that creates a validation generator the image data generator is especially valuable when working with large data sets because we don't need to hold the whole data set in memory at once but it's nice here even with a small data set now we fit the model we tell it the training data comes from trained generator we said to read 12 images at a time and we have 72 images so we'll go through 6 steps of 12 images then we say that