Hydrus
A personal booru-style media tagger that can import files and tags from your hard drive and popular websites. Content can be shared with other users via user-run servers.
What is Hydrus?
The Hydrus network client is a desktop application written for Anonymous and other internet-fluent media nerds who have large image/swf collections. It organises your files into an internal database and browses them with tags instead of folders, a little like a *booru on your desktop. Tags and files can be anonymously shared through custom servers that any user may run. Everything is free, and the source code is included with the release. It is developed mostly for Windows, but fairly functional builds for Linux and OS X are available.
The software is constantly being improved. I try to put out a new release every Wednesday by 8pm Eastern.
Currently importable filetypes are: images - jpg, gif (including animated), png (including animated!), tiff, webp, bmp video - webm, mp4, mpeg, avi, mov, mkv, flv, wmv audio - mp3, flac, ogg, wma misc - swf, pdf, psd, zip, rar, 7z
Audio is not well supported yet, but for anything that doesn't work, you can easily launch any file in your default program from inside the client.
The program's emphasis is on your freedom. There is no DRM, no phoning home, no censorship.
If you would like to try the program, I highly recommend you check out the help. A copy is included with the release as well.
Hydrus Screenshots
Hydrus Features
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- Image Viewer
- File Organizer
- Duplicate Images Finder
- image-organizer
- File Sharing
- tag-based-file-management
Recent user activities on Hydrus
- sbarras added Image Board as a feature to Hydrussb
- cthulhux added Duplicate Images Finder as a feature to Hydrusct
- cthulhux liked Hydrusct
The best thing made since sliced bread.
Maintaining any large reference file set or just archiving parts of the internet you'd like to keep around after the internet infrastructure eventually fails has proven to be a nightmare in the past. Hydrus lets you organize all of that, making it easier to search for content afterwards.
It supports custom tag repositories associated by file hashes & fetching tags online via *booru sites that have a matching file. Also lets you append source links of files In cases where you want to go to exactly where you downloaded the file(s) from.
[Edited by FlexSeal, November 29]
There's no alternative for this all in one media-tagger-database-organization-tool-with-inbuilt-download-functionality-for-many-popular-sites ... The developer is releasing new versions every week and is very active on the official 8ch board as well as on his tumblr where he answers a lot of questions.
8chan .. AND ... Tumblr ??
Oh, lawdy, someone's got a sense of humour, like them already ; )
Reply written ago
No software compares to this, a imageboard style tagging file manager-collection with preview embedded and tabs wether it's an image or pdf, etc.
the basics are easy to get around and has lots of features afterwards (like saving searches, queries, notes to the media, etc).
good developer and community, if you are someone who likes to collect media and the interwebz, this is the best software ever! very comfy, very nice
As someone that enjoys keeping large image collections, this software is a god-send. Attempting to manage and search through these files using the Windows file explorer is not only slow, but imprecise. Because of this, I've been wishing for a booru-style file manager for years and I'll be damned, it's existed all this time! And it is just as glorious as I imagined. Searching for files is far more precise and results fetch about 10x faster.
The transition will take some time, as importing and tagging my files manually is an arduous task that is going to take many hours to complete. But this is due to my insistence on using a personal tagging system. Were I so inclined, Hydrus has options to auto-tag your files based on what other users have tagged them in the past, forgoing the need to tag them yourself — provided someone else has tagged them, and you approve of their tag system, that is.
My main criticism would be that the UI can be a tad confusing at first, especially with how many options need to be displayed, but this is nowhere near a deal-breaker; You just need to take some time to figure it out. The included help files are very useful for initial setup, with the official Discord server being a good place to ask further questions if you find yourself in need.
Hydrus is incredibly powerful and the community is very helpful.
Hydrus creates an 'imageboard' on your local drive by importing the images you want (either selections from your hard drive or direct download). When it imports the images that you already have saved to your hard drive, it creates a copy of each image into a set of subfolders within the Hydrus program folder. It's up to you if you want to delete your old collections once you've imported them into Hydrus. These files are named using a hash (original filename discarded) and the tags are stored in a database so you must thereafter use Hydrus to manage tags for those files.
As far as I could tell, Hydrus does not add metadata to your already existing files including any tags recognized by Windows Explorer. It will create tags using file and/or folder names if you enable those options before import, so if you already sort media using folders and subfolders, Hydrus can use your already existing names as tags.
The author encourages us to abandon the use of file and folder names for cataloging large numbers of media files and I tend to agree, especially when you generate content faster than you can tag it (as in photography or if you enjoy downloading zillions of files at a time).
However, for many years I have already been using my file system to manage several archives of different media and desire a catalog manager that tags files in place, preserving my filenames and folder structure and which works on top of (or along side of) my file system. So I therefore use Hydrus for the bulk of my assorted download content and yet I continue to seek a suitable tagging utility for my already well-maintained collections as I'm not ready to let go of what's both trusted and familiar on my system.
NOTE: I only spent an hour or two evaluating this program on Windows 7 Pro with a small subset of my image archive, which really isn't much time to speak authoritatively about it, I may have misunderstood or missed something in the process so therefore you should evaluate it yourself. Overall, it was a bit fun even though I didn't immediately understand everything I was looking at.
Intrigued if @xvhpqg or anyone else has managed to solve this problem?
Meantime, there's this faq : https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/faq.html
And this database migration guide : https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/database_migration.html
Toes crossed, need the exercise
Reply written ago
i do not know i want just prove the program