help:artists

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 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.

How do I create an artist?

First off, go here. Second, search name and fill artist page.

You'll see five fields. Name is self-explanatory. Other Names are for any miscellaneous names or identities the artist has, separated by commas. For example, you can place the artist's name in kanji or kana in this field. Group is the name of the group or circle this artist belongs to. Notes are for any extra tidbits of information you want to mention (this field is actually saved to the artist's matching wiki page on Danbooru).

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.

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.

See also

• Using Pixiv: howto:pixiv