Tags

A tag is a short label for one thing about a picture: red_hair, beach, hakurei_reimu, 2003. Give each image a few and you can combine them in a search to narrow thousands of images down to the handful you want.

Adding tags#

Type tags into the tag box on an image’s page, separated by spaces. A tag can’t contain a space, so a multi-word tag uses underscores, or quotes that do it for you: "john doe" becomes john_doe. Names are lowercase and can use almost any character except spaces, quotes and *, so girls'_frontline, fate/grand_order and 東方project all work.

To tag many images at once, tick them in the gallery and use Add tags in the batch bar. Remove tags next to it takes tags off again, by name or by where they came from.

In an image’s tag list, click a tag to search for it. The ? in front of it opens the tag’s own page (see Notes and links).

Categories#

Every tag sits in a category, which says what kind of thing it names and gives it a colour: general for what’s in the picture, character, artist, copyright for the series or franchise, meta for things about the file, plus medium, person, year, species and rating. Put the category in front when you type: artist:"john doe" blue_eyes 1girl adds john_doe as an artist and the other two as general tags.

The Categories page lets you recolour categories and add your own.

Ratings and the SFW ceiling#

A rating says how safe an image is to have on screen, from general through sensitive and questionable to explicit. An image has one rating. Adding another replaces it, and yours always wins over an auto-tagger’s.

The rating buttons in the footer set the SFW ceiling: click sfw and everything rated above general disappears from the gallery, related images and anything else you browse. Batch actions on “the whole search” respect it too, so they never touch an image you can’t see. Click explicit to turn it off again. Each browser remembers its own ceiling.

Only those four ratings exist. If an imported library has its own spelling for them, like a safe or nsfw tag, fold it in: select the tag on the Tags page, use Alias to with rating:general (or whichever level fits) as the target, and its images pick up that rating. An image already rated higher keeps its level.

Where tags come from#

A tag can come from several places: you, an auto-tagger, a booru that monloader pulled from, the Hydrus Public Tag Repository, or monbooru itself. monbooru keeps track of each one separately, and an image’s tag list shows it next to the tag:

• 87%: only an auto-tagger vouches for this tag, and that’s how sure it was. The number goes away once you or a booru apply the tag too.
• x3: three sources agree on it. Hover to see which ones.
• Struck through and marked stale: the source that gave you the tag stopped listing it the last time it was refreshed. The tag stays until you decide; remove all at the bottom of the list clears every stale tag at once.

The [categories] / [sources] switch above the list regroups it by source, so you can see what each one added. Removing a tag in that view only withdraws that source’s claim: if another source also has the tag, it stays.

You can search on all of this: tagged:user finds images you tagged yourself, tagged:danbooru the ones danbooru tagged, autotagged:false the ones no auto-tagger has seen, and stale:any the ones with stale tags.

Tags monbooru adds by itself#

Some things can be read straight from the file, so monbooru tags them as images arrive: the size (highres, absurdres, lowres), an odd shape (wide_image, tall_image), what it is (video, animated, sound), and a few more like greyscale and ai-generated. They go in meta and follow Danbooru’s names and rules, so a picture pulled from there and one you tagged at home agree on what counts as highres.

They don’t count as tagging: tagged:false still finds an image nobody has tagged. They also follow the file, so replace a picture with a bigger version and lowres gives way to highres. The switch is under Settings -> General, and Settings -> Maintenance can add them to the images you already have or take them all off.

Aliases and implications#

People use different tags for the same thing: blond_hair and blonde_hair, or a character’s name in two orders. An alias points one spelling at another, so tagging or searching with blond_hair gives you blonde_hair.

On the Tags page, select the spellings you want to fold away and use Alias to: their images move to the target and the old names stay behind as aliases. Merge does the same among the selected tags, keeping the one you pick. Rename can keep the old name as an alias too, so saved searches that use it keep working.

An implication says one tag always brings another along: hatsune_miku implies vocaloid. Declare it with Imply on the Tags page or on the tag’s own page, and every image with hatsune_miku, now and later, gets vocaloid too. Implied tags are real tags as far as search is concerned. In an image’s tag list they sit indented under the tag that brought them, and leave when it does.

With monloader and its copy of the Public Tag Repository set up, Find aliases and implications on the Tags page fetches the aliases and implications the PTR knows for the selected tags. It only adds; nothing is removed or sent anywhere.

Tags are never deleted behind your back. A tag no image uses any more stays on the Tags page with a count of zero until you delete it.

Notes and links#

Every tag has its own page, opened with the ? in front of it in any tag list. It holds a note about what the tag means to you and a list of links (an artist’s pages, a series’ official site), along with the tag’s aliases and implications. The note takes the same formatting as image notes, so it can point at other tags with [tag]...[/tag].

An artist’s other names, like the ones Danbooru lists, go in as aliases on that page, in any script, so tagging or searching with any of them lands on the artist.