Lookup

A lookup asks the internet about one of your images: where does this picture come from, and how do other people tag it? A hit adds the source to the image and brings its tags in, which is a quick way to tag a pile of downloaded art you never got around to.

monbooru itself never goes online, so lookups go through a paired monloader. The addons quick start sets one up in a few minutes, and the lookup buttons appear once the two are paired. How monloader searches (which sites, in what order, how close a match has to be) is on the monloader lookup page.

There are two places to look:

• Online boorus, by the file’s hash, and by image similarity through IQDB and SauceNAO. Boorus know files by their original hash, so a resized or re-saved copy usually only turns up similar-looking candidates, each with a match percentage.
• The Hydrus Public Tag Repository (PTR), a big shared tag database, if monloader keeps a local copy of it. See Hydrus PTR.

Running lookups from monbooru#

On an image’s page:

• Lookup online boorus (or L) searches the boorus for this image.
• Pull tags, in the Public Tag Repository panel, brings in the tags the PTR has for this image.
• refresh on a source fetches that post again, for new tags, commentary and notes. Tags the source dropped are kept but marked stale (see Tags).
• upgrade shows up on a source when it has a different file from yours, usually a bigger one. It downloads the post’s file and swaps it in place of yours, keeping the image’s tags, sources and relations. Your old file is gone after that, so it asks first.

For many images at once, tick them (or take the whole search) and press Find tags in the batch bar. It can refresh every source the images have, look them up by hash, or switch them in or out of the nightly lookup below.

Looking up a library overnight#

Looking up a whole library by hand is slow, and doing it in one batch can burn through a site’s request allowance. The nightly run can do it a little at a time instead: tick either lookup under Settings -> Schedule and each night it works through the images that have no source yet.

• The Public Tag Repository pass is a local read and costs nothing, so it goes through every waiting image each night, and tries again when monloader’s copy of the PTR gets new data.
• The online boorus pass costs a real request per image, so monloader only accepts so many a day; set that under monloader’s Settings -> lookup. When the day’s allowance runs out, the pass picks up where it stopped the next night.

An image that isn’t found waits longer and longer before the next try, and after a handful of misses online it’s marked nothing found and left alone. Its page offers look again if you think that’s wrong.

Each image without a source also has a switch per pass, so you can keep your own drawings or commissions out of the online lookups (no booru will ever have them) while the free PTR pass still runs. In the schedule you can leave a whole gallery out, your photos for instance.