The artist library is a specialized database on Danbooru that serves both as a resource for artist homepages, and also as a way to determine the artist of an upload by parsing the URL it came from.

Making an artist entry can be a bit of a tricky endeavor, so this wiki should explain how to go about it.

What are artists?

An artist in Danbooru represents the person who created a piece of art. Danbooru's artist database tracks extra information about artists, including the websites they use and alternate names they're known under.

How do artist entries differ from tags?

For starters, artist entries list all websites or artist profiles that are associated with the artist. Danbooru uses these URLs to automatically identify the artist tag for new uploads, so it's very important to include this information.

Artists can also have multiple "other" names associated with them. Typically this includes the artist's Japanese name. Notes allow one to list other extraneous details.

Artist entries are also used to organize artists that are part of doujin circles. A circle is represented as an artist entry that has multiple group members.

How to find an artist's name

On most art sites, the artist's name should be prominently displayed somewhere on their profile or alongside the post the art comes from. For smaller sites like an artist's home page or blog, information usually come in "about", "profile", "info", "link", "プロファイル", "インフォ", "アバウト", or "管理人" page. The artist's name may appear after "PN", "HN", "管理人", "名前", etc. Their circle or site name may appear after "サイト名" or "HP".

Many Japanese artists will give their name in kanji, which may make it difficult to romanize. Sites like Tangorin can offer assistance with this. If there are multiple readings given, try to see if there is a connection between one of them and the artist's pixiv or Twitter username, site name or link, or email address. If you can't figure it out, you can ask in topic #8199 and someone will be able to offer you help.

If the artist's name is in kana, you can romanize their name yourself using the tables on Wikipedia for hiragana or katakana. howto:romanize contains Danbooru's guidelines on romanization.

If the tag name you want to use already exists, you must qualify it with the artist's group name or handle from a site.

How do I search for artists?

Start at the index. In addition to browsing through the entire artist list, you can also search for artist by name or by URL.

By default, Danbooru will search across names, other names, and group names using exact string matching. You can do wildcard searching with "*". For example, searching for "bol*" will return any artist whose name starts with "bol".

If you only want to search the name field, prefix your query with name: like name:john. group: and other: work similarly.

Suppose you know the artist's homepage, but can't figure out their name. Simply search for the URL (beginning with http) and Danbooru will return any associated artists.

What is a banned artist?

Artists may request that all their works to be removed from the site. When this happens, the artist is marked as banned. New uploads by a banned artist will be taken down automatically.

See banned artist for the full list of banned artists.

Are artists tied to tags?

No. If you create an artist-typed tag, a corresponding artist is not automatically created. If you create an artist but no corresponding tag, searching for posts by that artist won't return any results.

You can think of the artist database as separate from the tags database.

This is an intentional design decision. By keeping the two separated, users have far more freedom when it comes to creating aliases, groups, and edits.

When I search for a URL, I get a bunch of unrelated results. What's going on?

Short answer: this is just a side-effect of the way Danbooru searches URLs. Multiple results typically mean Danbooru couldn't find the artist.

Long answer: when you're searching for a URL, typically it's a URL to an image on the artist's site. If this is a new image, querying this will obviously return no results.

So what Danbooru does is progressively chop off directories from the URL. http://site.com/a/b/c.jpg becomes http://site.com/a/b becomes http://site.com/a becomes http://site.com. It keeps doing this until a match is found. Danbooru does this more than once because there are cases where the URL is nested by date, like in http://site.com/2007/06/05/image.jpg. Usually this algorithm works very well, provided the artist has an entry in the database.

If they do not, then the algorithm is probably going to cut the URL down to just the domain, e.g. http://geocities.co.jp. When this happens, you'll sometimes get every artist hosted on that domain.

Why not just dump all the results if you get more than one? Well, there are a few cases when multiple artists validly map to the same domain. Usually the domain is just being used to host files or something.

Is there an API?

Yes. The artist controller uses the same interface as the rest of Danbooru. See the API documentation for details.

How to make an artist entry

Ideally this should be done before you tag and post the art, as creating an artist entry will automatically create an associated artist tag and allows automatically fetching the artist from a source post.

To create an entry, you can either go to the new artist page under the Artists tab at the top of the page, or from the upload page (The page where you're prompted to tag before clicking "Post") click the "create new artist" link under the Source tab. Using the link from the upload page will automatically populate the artist entry with an artist name, other names, and URLs, if the site is supported by Danbooru. The automatically populated artist name may not be ideal, so you are free to change it to a better name as determined by the previous section.

From here, you'll see four fields.

• Name is self-explanatory.
• Other Names are for any miscellaneous names or identities the artist has, separated by spaces. These are generally what you should add in this field:

• Names in kanji
• Names in kana
• Site name
• Circle name
• Pixiv nickname (Found under Pixiv avatar)
• Pixiv username (Found in the Pixiv stacc feed URL)
• Twitter name
• Usernames or handles from any other site

• Group is usually the circle name. Only one group name is supported, as commas and spaces are considered part of the name. Unlike tag names, the group name supports any characters and thus you should use the original spelling and stylization of the name, including CJK characters, asterisks, and capitalization.

• The URLs field is a list of URLs associated with the artist, like their home page, their blog, and any servers that store the artist's images. Separate URLs with newlines or spaces.

If you've created a general (blue) tag by mistake, you have to change it to an artist tag before Danbooru will allow you to make an artist entry with that name. To do that, you can simple prefix the tag name with art: or artist: from the tag edit field on the post it's tagged on, or by finding it on the tags listing, clicking the triplet dot dropdown menu and clicking "Edit". Note that you should not do this for existing tags, only ones you have created as the wrong category by mistake.

Editing artist entries

If you want to supply additional URLs, Other names, or update the Group name- You can do so from the /posts/ page, clicking "Artist" next to "Posts", and clicking "Edit artist", or by accessing the entry from /artists/ and clicking "Edit" under the sub-tabs (Or "Edit artist" below the list of URLs).
Do not remove dead URLs. See topic #8048 for the many reasons why you should leave them alone. Instead, prefix the URL with a - to mark it as dead.
If you think the presently assigned name is unsuitable, consider going to the Artist alias request thread and submitting an alias request. You can also manually edit the name of the artist entry under the Name field, but it is preferred to alias, as this will simultaneously update all tagged posts to the new name.

Wikis

A wiki can exist for an artist, but must be created from the new Wiki page. This is typically only reserved for important details such as requests not to merge with any alt artist entries, or if the entry is for a commissioner/reposter of some kind. Wikis for artists should not contain any of the URLs associated, to avoid any redundancy.

See also

• Table of Contents
• Using Pixiv: howto:pixiv

View wiki