
Hydrus – a tag-based media organizer - Oxitendwe
https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/
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fiatjaf
The context is horrible ( 4chan and 8chan, with a thread watcher any regular
booru hentai foundry pixiv tumblr deviant art newgrounds generic direct-image-
linked gallery pages ), but the idea seems great.

Resembles what git-annex tagging can do.

~~~
Oxitendwe
Yeah, I think it represents an advancement in the state of the art of tag-
based media organizational systems - with regular boorus (or any other tag-
based online image gallery) for example, which all have a specific focus,
you're not tagging the pictures that you have on your computer, you're tagging
_their_ pictures, so the database exists on their servers, doesn't work with
any other gallery websites, and isn't related to whatever you have on your
hard drive. Hydrus distributes tagging, so each owner of an image can tag it
how they like, and then share those tags with other people who have an image
of the same hash - the mapping (from hashes to tags) exists on your computer,
can be easily shared and manipulated, and is directly related to files on your
hard disk, not to mention that there are no gatekeepers and curators to decide
if your files are worth hosting on their site.

It's a pretty incredible achievement - some things I would love to see added
to it are some way of grouping mappings, or making particular sets of them
special - like Gelbooru's mapping, and Danbooru's, and etc. This would open up
the door to having transformations between sets of mappings (functors, you
could perhaps call them?). For example, if you wanted to use Gelbooru's
mappings (they are less strict than Danbooru) with Danbooru's tagging
conventions, you could write some mapping of tags to tags (or, more like a
mapping from mappings from hashes to tags, as the transformation of a single
tag might depend on the presence of other tags), which could transform some of
Gelbooru's tags into a set that follows the conventions followed on Danbooru.

Another important open problem seems to be that cryptographic hashing as the
only equality metric for files is clearly too strict - thumbnails, minor image
transformations (like PNG -> JPG), watermarking, etc, all appear as "different
files" to the tagging system. I would love for there to be some way of
equating files modulo some other function, like for images there is color
histograms, keypoint matching, phash, etc.

~~~
fiatjaf
I had never heard of or knew about the existence of any "booru" (this term is
totally new to me, the only thing I know is that 4chan is disgusting).

I've taken a look and it's actually amazing what they can do with tags. I'll
try hydrus with my personal files (photos, text files, audio recordings), but
I imagine the problem will be that they're not all on the same computer at the
same time[1], so maybe some glue will have to be made, or perhaps the library
will have to be abstracted so it supports just hashes and also not only
images.

The question of where does hydrus store its tags database is also worth
making.

[1]: [https://git-annex.branchable.com/](https://git-annex.branchable.com/)

