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I made a post on the official Hydrus thread. It seems that the flavour of features I want are going to be earmarked for being added sometime later this year.

I wrote a program to download images from various places and parse the pages for their tags, and insert them into a database, so that I didn't have to file stuff under both "cheerilee/comic" and "comic/cheerilee." It's a horrible program that I poured way too many hours into over the years, but it works. I highly recommend you use the philomena project instead.

@ToastedTruffles

@AA

My technique involves a lot of nesting to stay organized and although I've thought about a tag-based system the advantage of folder nesting is its compatibility with different operating systems.

My pony images folder could use some more organization, to be honest.
I find that different methods of organization are best when you have different numbers of files to keep track of. Folder nesting works good up to a point, but then it becomes more of a hassle to upkeep it than something like a tagged system. Right now, one of the issues keeping me from going right to a tagged system is that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent function to the galleries/pools function on the boorus. an ordered file collection for variant images or artist sets.

In Hydrus I kinda fixed the problem using "Parents" and "namespaces.
So it is like this:

Top parent: show:my little pony (namespace "show")
child: — character:applejack (namespace "character")
child: — gallery:015 (namespace "gallery")
child: — file01
— file02
— file03
— file04


So, in this way I can keep track of files and the order they have in the parent gallery. Granted, to do this manually is a real pain but I have no idea how to automatize this.

The search workflow for example, is to search for "applejack", then the gallery, and then look at the tags (01, 02, 03…) for their order. At this time I didn't figure out yet how play the files in an ordered fashion in the Hydrus' viewer. The developer says that this is doable and he's thinking how to do it.

@AA

My technique involves a lot of nesting to stay organized and although I've thought about a tag-based system the advantage of folder nesting is its compatibility with different operating systems.

My pony images folder could use some more organization, to be honest.
I find that different methods of organization are best when you have different numbers of files to keep track of. Folder nesting works good up to a point, but then it becomes more of a hassle to upkeep it than something like a tagged system. Right now, one of the issues keeping me from going right to a tagged system is that there doesn't seem to be an equivalent function to the galleries/pools function on the boorus. an ordered file collection for variant images or artist sets.

@Soft Lava

Since my old pc died i just have a new single folder. It's too much of a hassle to sort the shit out again after that.

I now that feeling.

Since my old pc died i just have a new single folder. It's too much of a hassle to sort the shit out again after that.

I've organized all my memes by alphabetical order so my folder of ponies goes under "P"
There I separate everything by mood as I primarily use these as reaction images. So "Action," "Angry/Annoyed/Bored," "Cute/Wholesome," "Happy," "Horror," "Humorous," "Interested," "NSFW," "Otherwise /mlpol/," "Relaxed," "Sad," and "Surprised/Anxious/Sad"
Each of this is subdivided for every major character in the series + Anonfilly, Aryanne and Co. and Leslie Fair. Pictures with more than one pony or a minor character/OC are lumped into "Other/Multiple" while those about non-pony creatures are put under "Non-ponies"

"Action" is instead divided into "Art," "Dramatic Poses," "Informative," "Non-MLP in MLP," "Regular Activities," "Sports," and "War and Politics." "Art" contains separate folders for animation, synthwave aesthetics, music (whether an actual music video or a picture of ponies playing music), and traditional art, nature and landscapes. "Dramatic poses" are what you'd expect like ponies dressed up like superheroes. Informative means art references and theories about the show. "Non-MLP in MLP" includes folders of crossovers, ponified concepts and people, posters & logos, robots/computers, and space. "Regular activities" has folders of day-to-day pony behaviors such as bathing, celebrating, eating and drinking, working out, flying, wearing costumes, playing, going to school or romance. "Seasonal" has pictures of holiday-themed pictures grouped by holiday. Sports has pictures of ponies playing different sorts of sports. "War & Politics" has folders of ponies fighting, propaganda pieces and soldiers or ponies with guns.

/mlpol/ has folders for /mlpol/ memes, /mlpol/ logos and posters, /mlpol/-themed propaganda, posts I've screencapped, and /mlpol/-themed videos.

My technique involves a lot of nesting to stay organized and although I've thought about a tag-based system the advantage of folder nesting is its compatibility with different operating systems.

B:\art for all my drawings, WIPs, finished, etc.
B:\films for anything that is a movie
B:\work for important stuff
B:\design which I moved into \art
B:\web for webdesign and interfaces
B:\music for various albums
B:\bordel for whatever stuff. memes, cringe…
B:\furi for furry stuff I liked
B:\tofs for more or less artsy photos
B:\stock originally for textures and other photos I use as graphic elements
B:\poni unsorted. Your stuff might be in there.
B:\text various .docs ebooks, documents, etc.
B:\pics for images of all kind, wallpapers essentially, misc artists.
nothing is really organized in there, other by date. if any random person manages to access this computer, he'll be lost.
speaking of, tonight it's backup time!

@ToastedTruffles

Do you know if Hydrus has any support for things like Galleries or Pools? Things like themed sets, art packs, or ordered image sequences seem to show up a lot in what I download.

I can't tell because my use of it is only off-line, I mean, only to local tagging and never connected to the network.
For further inquiries you can contact the developer at: https://8chan.moe/t/res/2219.html

I started poking around a bit, and I'm not sure that dumping random files by the hundreds into Hydrus is the way to do things. Aside from characters and franchises, lots of the tags are just going to not occur to me to tag. I think that this "public tag repository" thing I heard about on the Hydrus help files might be interesting, but I'll need to get a dedicated SSD for that to work. I set Grabber to downsize any images that are above 1920 pixels in length, so that might get in the way of the public Tag Repository's work.

Do you know if Hydrus has any support for things like Galleries or Pools? Things like themed sets, art packs, or ordered image sequences seem to show up a lot in what I download.

Two more pics.
https://i.postimg.cc/kMTJ7GN5/5.png
https://i.postimg.cc/gjjPxyy2/6.png

Also, if you import a video and it plays without sound, don't panic.
Go to File/Options/Media, in the field "media viewer mime handling", go to the line "video — show with native hydrus viewer", then double click on it.
A new window will show up with more settings, change both instances of "show with native hydrus viewer" to "show using mpv".
Done. Now you have sound. Volume is set by right clicking the viewer and selecting the desired level.

My system is very time consuming because I use a double method; the traditional ordered by folder with each file properly renamed for system wide searches, and the method of using Hydrus. Both in parallel, so I have 2 copies of every file, one inside folders and the second inside the Hydrus' database.
The reason for this is because in the future the Hydrus developer might stop maintaining it and then stop working with future operating systems.

For each file I have created a sidecar .TXT file containing the tags. The reason for this is that in the future a database failure may happen and then hundreds, if not thousands of hours tagging files might be lost.
Granted, it is a lot of work, but better safe than sorry (SEE PIC 1).
Hydrus allows to backup and later restore the database, but my point of view is to be ready with the .TXT file in case of migration to another software.
Also sidecar .TXT files is the method Hydrus uses to import files and tag them in one step (SEE PICS 2 and 3).

PIC 1: https://i.postimg.cc/25vTTp6p/1.png
PIC 2: https://i.postimg.cc/MHGyCgWp/2.png
PIC 3: https://i.postimg.cc/4yn9Lt5K/3.png

I extracted the .zip installer and started experimenting with hydrus yesterday. I imported a folder of about 750 "game over" images from my general unsorted smut folders. Tagging each image by hand is taking a while. It looks like it's almost better to just import my already-sorted collection so I can mass-tag hundreds of images at once

How would you recommend I make the switch to Hydrus? Should I make the switch from my already-sorted collection (a few hundred of them at a time so that I'm not overwhelmed by tagging issues), or am I best served by importing batches of unsorted general images that I'm not sure how to organize? What is my workflow for images that look decent enough for me to want to download, but aren't distinctive enough for me to give more than a couple of tags?

@ToastedTruffles

I've been considering swapping to Hydrus now that I've seen it talked about so much. How does it deal with image sequences / variant sets? Can I set up image pools for them? Or parent-child image relations?

I deal with the issue using "namespaces".
What is a namespace?: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/faq.html
For example given a set of 5 files named "XYZ 01 — red anonfilly.png" to "XYZ 05 — red anonfilly.png", I would tag them as follows:
character:red anonfilly
file:XYZ
item number:XYZ 01
item number:XYZ 02
item number:XYZ 03
item number:XYZ 04
item number:XYZ 05

So, searching for namespace:file:XYZ will return also all items XYZ 01 to 05.
It works pretty well for me, the drawback is the time invested in tagging the files, which is very taxing.
In the pic shown, searching for item number:000426 will return all the instances of it (12).
https://postimg.cc/6TRbsPgx

@ToastedTruffles
If they're in alternate clothing versions, I'd just mark them as alternates of each other. I'm not sure if you can set them to always appear next to each other. I haven't found a way, at least, so it might be a better question for Hydrus's Q&A thread whenever it comes back online.

As for having easy access to the whole set when finding a file, you can right click on the file → manage → file relationships → view this file's relationships and it'll display all alternates.

There are often sequences of images where the character is in various states of undress. There are usually between 2 to around 7 different images in this sequence. This is too few images to constitute a full themed imageset, and it's clearly not the same kind of grouping as a comic that has a sequential story.

How can I use Hydrus to organize these images such that they appear next to each other, or that when I find one image in a tagged search, that I can both recognize that these images are part of some kind of set, and simultaneously have very easy access to viewing the whole set at once?

I'm skimming the documentation now.

@ToastedTruffles
Not sure I'm quite getting you. You can set images as alternates or duplicates of each other, but not parent-child trees as far as I know. More extensive alternate handling is planned™ according to the help documentation.

For image sequences, which I'm assuming mean stuff like pusspuss's work, there's a sorting option that will display images in order of creator-series-title-volume-chapter-page, so if you want it displayed in a particular order you can add a page tag to it.

I've been considering swapping to Hydrus now that I've seen it talked about so much. How does it deal with image sequences / variant sets? Can I set up image pools for them? Or parent-child image relations?

@Background Pony #9512
I agree. Hydrus is the best to find files by tags.

@ToastedTruffles
For images and webms/smaller mp4s, hydrus. Makes it so I don't have to try to remember what name I gave a specific file four years ago, or where in god's name I put it. Music I just let sit in the directory since filling in the metadata makes it easy enough to search through, though I should probably make an MLP subdirectory. Games, both SFW and NSFW, are loosely collected in the MLP subdirectory in my NSFW games folder.

I haven't thought of a solution for videos, mainly because I don't keep enough to make organizing a problem.

@Soft Lava
>anthro
Gross

A picture is worth a thousand words. Behold.




Some names and pictures are hidden because they are highly embarrasing (even to my standarts). This collection has been occupying my drive for 5 years straight and has proven to be the most effective way to stor data. Alphabetical order didn't do it for me so I've set my priority with inserting a letter before a directory of my choosing.

Over the years, I'm sure we've all downloaded tons of MLP related files. I'm just curious about how they're all stored.

I've got most of my MLP stuff split between SFW images, comics, and webms, all NSFW stuff in the same place, scattered individual music tracks in an "MLP Music" folder inside my main music folder, show files in with my other show files, "collected MLP videos" from youtube in with other folders of other fun or interesting YT videos I've downloaded over the years, music albums in my music album folder, which is a separate folder directory from my Loose Music directory, and I have a "Multimedia — MLP" folder where I collected the various comics and some other loose MLP content.

On one hand, I want to keep my folder organization such that I can easily search through all the Images or Music I have to browse between the same kinds of media. On the other hand, I also want to have folders dedicated to all the collected files from multimedia projects. Things that have text, comics, video, music, and all varieties of fan content.

MLP game mods and fangames are in mod directories for the games themselves, or they're in the "games" folder under "MLP Fangames".

I'm in a weird in-between state right now, and I'm curious at how other people are managing similar problems.