howto:artist
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 howto should explain how to go about it.
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 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, click the "create new artist" link on the upload page, or go to the new artist page. 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.
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:, or by finding it on the tags listing and clicking "Edit". Note that you should not do this for existing tags, only ones you have created as the wrong category by mistake.
Other Names
These are generally what you should add in this field:
- Names in kanji
- Names in kana
- Site name
- Circle name
- pixiv nickname (find under pixiv avatar)
- pixiv username (find in the pixiv stacc feed URL)
- Twitter name
- Usernames or handles from any other site
Group
This 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.
URLs
All links that are useful in finding arts and information about the artist.
- Home Page
- Circle Home Page
- Blog
- pixiv account, including stacc URL if you can find it
- Twitter account, including intent URL if you can find it
- NicoVideo account, with both of the NicoSeiga user/illust/### and user/illust/###?target=illust_all links included
- All other social accounts you can find (DeviantArt, Lofter, Weibo, etc.)
Do not remove dead URLs. See topic #8048 for the many reasons why you should leave them alone. Instead, add a - in front of the URL to mark it as dead.