First steps
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You have monbooru running and an empty gallery. This page walks the basic loop once, with a handful of images: add them, tag them, find them by search, and archive them. Each step has a fuller guide page; the links point there.
Add a few images#
Two ways in:
- Copy files into the watched folder. The default gallery is the
folder you pointed setup at - a desktop install offers
Pictures/monbooru, a container reads/gallery(whatever host folder you mounted there). Copy files in, and the watcher indexes them within seconds. Files that were already in the folder before monbooru started are picked up by a sync: click the sync icon at the top right. Subfolders are fine; monbooru keeps your folder structure and shows it as a tree in the sidebar. - Upload from the browser. Open Inbox in the top menu and drop files into the drop zone.
Accepted formats are JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, MP4, WebM, and CBZ/ZIP comic archives. The same file added twice (even under two different paths) is recognized by its checksum and stored once.
Either way, new images land in the inbox, the pile of things you have not reviewed yet.
Open one and tag it#
Click a thumbnail to open its detail page: the image, its tags, and the file’s metadata.
Type a few tags into the tag input, separated by spaces: what is in
the picture (red_hair, beach), who made it (artist:"john doe"),
anything you will want to search by later. Add a rating tag too
(rating:general up to rating:explicit) to say how safe the image
is to have on screen. Tags has the full
syntax and how ratings work.
If you want to speed up the process, the auto-tagger runs an image-tagging model locally, on your own CPU or GPU, and tags your collection for you.
Search for it#
The search bar combines tags and filters:
red_hair -sketch rating:general finds images tagged red_hair, not
tagged sketch, rated general. The full syntax is in
Searching.
Everything in the sidebar (the tags on the current page of results, top sources, your folder tree, saved searches) is clickable and narrows the search. Checking thumbnails in the grid brings up a batch bar with actions that apply to the selection, and on a detail page the arrow keys walk the previous and next result of the current search.
The footer carries the SFW ceiling: click a rating level to hide anything ranked above it (convenient when someone is looking over your shoulder).
Archive what you reviewed#
Once an image’s tags and rating look right, flip it from inbox to
archived: press i on its detail page, or select a batch of
thumbnails and flip them from the batch bar.
Cheatsheets in the app#
- Type
system:in the search bar to open a dropdown listing every search filter, with drill-down hints for each one. - Press
?on any page for the keyboard shortcuts overlay. The UI is fully keyboard-drivable, from grid navigation to batch actions. - The
helplink in the footer opens this documentation.