Downloading

Sending URLs to the queue#

Paste a URL into the add bar and press Enter. Anything a gallery-dl extractor matches works: a single booru post, a pool, a tag search, an artist page, a manga or comic gallery, or a direct link to an image file. The bar also accepts a bare md5 hash to import the booru post carrying that file; see tagging by hash below.

Items can also reach the queue from the monsender extension, which sends the page you are browsing in one click, or from scripts POSTing to /api/v1/queue with a bearer token (see API and development).

A queued URL is a job. It is first resolved to the posts it expands to (one job becomes one or more items); each item is downloaded, its metadata mapped onto monbooru’s model, and the file pushed into the target monbooru gallery. Files are deleted from scratch space once monbooru has accepted them; monloader keeps no copy of anything.

Per-item outcomes#

Every item ends with one of eight outcomes:

monbooru ingests jpg, png, webp, gif, mp4, webm, and cbz files; a download of any other type (audio, svg, a document) is skipped_unsupported rather than pushed and rejected. A failed item carries a stable machine-readable error code; the full table is in API and development.

Large searches: the cap#

A tag search or an artist page can expand to thousands of posts, so a job takes at most max_items_per_job posts (default 200). A capped job offers two follow-ups: get next N fetches the next window of the search (N follows the cap down if you lower it afterwards), and get all keeps fetching until the search runs short. A search and its continuations collapse into one queue row with summed counts.

Booru pools and manga galleries are exempt from the cap: they are one work you asked for as a unit and always come down whole.

Retry, force, and cancel#

• retry re-runs a job. For a bulk search that finished cleanly, posts already fetched are skipped (skipped_archive). A job that failed fetches everything again, because a post it had downloaded may never have reached monbooru.
• force download bypasses the archive skip and fetches already-fetched items again - useful to re-import a post whose image you deleted in monbooru. On a search that was continued, it covers every window the row counts, not just the last batch.
• Re-submitting a single post always re-fetches it: monbooru recognizes the file and merges any new tags into the existing image, so this is how you refresh one post from its source.
• cancel stops a job whether or not it has started; items still in flight end as canceled, finished ones keep their outcome. cancel pending does the same to every job that has not started yet.

The queue does not run on across a stop: stopping or restarting monloader cancels every job that had not finished, and the rows stay in the queue for a retry next time. A job that was mid-download then comes back marked interrupted, with a one-click requeue rather than an automatic one.

Finished rows get automatically removed after the delay windows set in Settings -> downloads. You can set different windows for successful downloads and failed ones. Set either to 0 to turn it off; in any case, rows still get removed once the queue’s max limit of 100 pushes them out.

Pause and resume#

The pause button (also in the monsender popup) holds all downloads globally: the job in flight finishes, then nothing new starts until you resume. Use it to queue up a batch before letting it run. The pause does not survive a restart: a restarted monloader starts unpaused.

Pools and manga#

Multi-page works are handled by kind:

• A booru pool (an ordered set of posts forming one work) imports as an ordered collection: each page is pushed as its own image under a shared collection label (the pool name) and page number, keeping each page’s own tags.
• A manga or comic gallery is bundled, in order, into a single .cbz file (a comic book archive) and pushed as one file, which monbooru opens in its reader. The bundle’s tags are the union across the pages and its rating the strictest seen. If any page fails to download, the job fails rather than pushing a truncated book.
• A manga title page that lists chapters imports each chapter as its own .cbz.

Some URLs list other pages rather than files - a forum thread whose images are hosted elsewhere, an archive board. monloader follows these handoffs and imports the files they lead to as loose items, bounded by the per-job cap.

Tagging by hash#

Two features find a post from a file hash instead of a URL; both walk the same lookup chain and show up on the queue page as jobs like any other:

• Hash import: paste a file’s md5 (bare or as md5:<hash>) into the add bar and the matching booru post is imported like any single post.
• Lookup enrich: monbooru’s lookup buttons ask monloader to find tags for an image it already holds and merge them in, without re-downloading the file.