Does anybody have any recommendations for a desktop software that would allow me to organize and search images on my computer via tags? Like a booru or something but offline and just for me lol. My decade-old reference folder is becoming unusable

The three programs I tested out were Hydrus Network, Tagspaces Lite, and Allusion. All three of them are free and don't require you to sign up or make an account for anything (my baseline prerequisites for if I will even consider a piece of software lol)

I guess I am writing straight up reviews for these programs now because this is all information I wish I had six hours ago, and maybe somebody reading this is like I was six hours ago.

Hydrus Network

This one seems to be by and for power user booru people who want to make their own booru, primarily for local use, but optionally online as well. It's made mostly for media files, and supports a wide range of image, video, and audio files. It has a lot of different features, and as a result has an intimidating, confusing interface, absolutely arcane documentation, and most people will probably only use like 10% of its functions and menus. The Bizhawk of tag-based file organization software, if you will. (you won't)

Pros:

• Extremely wide range of features
• Wide variety of supported file types
• Has various optional online functionalities (like setting up your own server and anonymously sharing your tags and files), if you want that
• Various integrations with tumblr, twitter, and a handful of the more popular gallery sites and boorus

Cons:

• Confusing
• Slow to set up (It took me like two hours to import my folder of around 8,500 images)
• Probably overkill for whatever you're trying to use it for
• Borderline-Blender-levels of "This interface makes me want to curl up into a ball and expire"
• Storage concern (Works by straight up duplicating all your shit into a database, doubling the amount of space your media is taking up unless you delete the original files, which you probably do not want to do)
• Since files are imported into a database, any change made to a file or folder will not be reflected automatically in the program -- you have to import again every time you want to add a file or update an existing one

Tagspaces Lite

This one is a more straightforward, general-purpose file tagging/organizing software, and supports any file type as far as I could tell. It's a little nicer looking and more intuitive than Hydrus, but has fewer features. Tagspaces also has a paid version with more features that it's a little too eager to annoy you about.

Pros:

• Very simple and focused
• Can be used to tag any file type, or even folders

Cons:

• Thumbnails are finicky and straight up disappear sometimes
• Random features are excluded because they really want you to upgrade to the paid version (Like for some reason it just won't generate thumbnails for some file types unless you upgrade?? Various view modes are disabled as well.)
• Interface is somewhat clunky and cluttered with buttons you couldn't use even if you wanted to because, again, half of them are features of the paid version that they really really want you to upgrade to
• Messes with your shit (Works by either appending tags to your filenames, or by installing a little folder with a json file in every folder its pointed at)

Allusion

My personal favorite of the three programs I tried, probably because it was so specifically-tailored to my use-case. Allusion is specifically made for artists who want to better organize their images. This means it can't be used for anything besides images, but images was all that I wanted to manage anyway. I couldn't find a list of supported file types, but it worked fine with every image I threw at it (and I've got some weird shit in there -- animated pngs, animated webps, bmps, I think I've even got a jpg-large or two. Whatever those are.)

Pros:

• Simple, clean, easy-to-use interface
• Doesn't mess with or change any of your files or folders at all
• Allows you to nest tags (for example, you could put "standing" and "sitting" tags as sub-tags under a "pose reference" tag, etc.)
• Integrates with PureRef, if that's something you use

Cons:

• Can only be used for image files
• Lacking in features compared to the other two programs
• It's an electron application, and, to my understanding, a lot of people fucking hate that for some reason
  
  
  

TL;DR:

Try Allusion if you just wanna tag some images.
Try Tagspaces if you wanna tag anything.
Try Hydrus if you're a power user who wants a lot of extremely-specific features.

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