monbooru

monbooru is a private booru you run on your own machine. A booru is a tag-based image gallery: instead of sorting pictures into folders you attach tags to them (red_hair, character:hakurei_reimu, rating:general) and find things back by combining tags in a search.

It is built for organizing a local media collection: your own photos and videos, downloaded art, manga archives, and AI-generated images. Everything runs from a single small binary with one SQLite database per gallery. Your files stay ordinary files on disk; removing monbooru leaves them exactly where they were.

monbooru itself never touches the internet. Online features (downloading from boorus, reverse image lookup) are handled by the optional addons.

Local network only. monbooru is designed for a trusted home network or private VPN. It is not hardened for direct exposure to the public internet. If you expose it anyway, the extra hardening (TLS, access control…) is on you.

What it does

  • Tag-based gallery with a folder tree, favorites, saved searches, collections and rating tags with an SFW ceiling. See Searching and Tags.
  • A file watcher picks up new, moved and deleted files within seconds, and new images land in an inbox for review.
  • Reads Stable Diffusion metadata (A1111/Forge and ComfyUI): prompts, models, seeds, full workflows. See AI metadata.
  • Local auto-tagging with ONNX models (WD14 SwinV2, JoyTag, Camie v2) on CPU or GPU.
  • Images, video, animated GIFs, plus CBZ/ZIP archives browsed as one object with a built-in manga reader.
  • Relations between images: duplicates, alternates, version chains, derivatives, with near-duplicate detection and a side-by-side review session.
  • Multiple galleries in one instance, each with its own files and database, plus export, import and migration from Hydrus or Blombooru.
  • Reverse lookup of your images against boorus, IQDB/SauceNAO and the Hydrus PTR, through a paired monloader.
  • A REST API with scoped tokens, covered in Development.

Where to go

  • Install gets it running with Docker in a few minutes; First steps walks the UI.
  • The guides cover each feature in day-to-day terms.
  • Configuration has the environment variables, theming and advanced tagger setup.

Addons

monbooru works on its own, and nothing in it depends on the other apps being present. Two optional companions extend it:

  • monloader adds the online half: it downloads posts from booru sites into your collection with their tags, and runs reverse lookups on images you already have to backfill tags and sources. monbooru stays offline; monloader connects to the internet.
  • monsender adds the browser shortcut: an extension that sends the page you are viewing, or images picked from it, straight to monloader’s download queue. It needs monloader.

The addons overview explains how the pieces fit, and the quick start adds both to a running monbooru.