monbooru

monbooru is a private booru that runs on your own machine. A booru is an image gallery you browse with tags instead of folders: you give pictures tags like red_hair, character:hakurei_reimu or rating:general, then find them again by combining tags in a search. If you have thousands of images and can never find the one you want, monbooru might help.

It’s made for a local collection: your photos and videos, downloaded art, manga archives, etc. Your files stay ordinary files in ordinary folders. monbooru watches those folders and keeps what it knows about them (tags, ratings, relations) in its own database, so removing it leaves your files exactly where they were.

monbooru never goes on the internet by itself. Downloading from boorus and looking up where an image came from are the job of the optional addons.

Keep it on your home network. monbooru is meant for a trusted network or a private VPN. It has an optional password but isn’t thought for exposure to the open internet. If you expose it anyway, put proper reverse protections in front.

What it can do#

  • Tag and search your collection, with categories, ratings and a safe-for-work ceiling you can flip on when someone’s looking over your shoulder.
  • Pick up new files on its own and put them in an inbox until you’ve had a look.
  • Read the prompts and settings Stable Diffusion tools save in their images. See AI metadata.
  • Tag images for you with a model running on your own CPU or GPU.
  • Show images, videos and animated GIFs, and read CBZ/ZIP archives in a built-in manga reader.
  • Find near-duplicates and variants and keep track of which is which.
  • Hold several galleries, and import a library from supported apps.
  • With monloader, download from boorus and look up tags for images you already have.

Where to start#

Install it, then follow First steps to add and tag your first images. The guides cover each feature in turn, and Advanced has the config file, GPU setup, themes and the API.

Addons#

monbooru works fine on its own. Two optional companions add online capabilities:

  • monloader downloads posts from booru sites into your collection, tags included, and finds tags and sources for images you already have.
  • monsender is a browser extension that sends the page you’re looking at to monloader in one click.

The addons overview explains how they fit together.