your gallery probably sucks: here is an solution

Say you’re a person who loves taking photos. You capture everything: your family, yourself, vacations, houses, pets—the works. Damn, your gallery has a lot of stuff! You’re probably sitting on thousands of images, and you’re very proud of your collection.

That is, until someone asks you to find one specific photo. “What photo?” you ask, and the person simply responds: “That one with a dog.” You gulp nervously. You know you have a few photos of dogs, but they are scattered so deep within your infinite gallery that finding them will require a good amount of scrolling, time, and attention.

Maybe this has happened to you. Modern galleries are simply not built for people who take more photos than they can remember, which is most of us today. Even if you’re not in the photo-taking business, you’d still find it beneficial to find all your memes with one simple keyword. But if folders fail, what’s the real solution to these problems?

The issue with folder-based galleries

Folder-based galleries were the first attempt at fixing the organization problem, and they work—at least in theory.

For example, you have one folder (or album) for dogs and one for cats. You put your dog pictures in the “Dogs” folder and the cat pictures in the “Cats” folder. Sounds easy, right? That is, until you get an image with both a dog and a cat. Now, where the hell are you going to put it?

You could try to be more general, such as creating one folder for all “Animals.” But when you need a specific cat picture, you can’t just dive into the huge “Animals” folder and immediately grab it. You still have to manually sort through the results to find your desired image. This rigidity, where one file can only belong to one folder, makes the traditional system an utterly inefficient way to properly categorize media.

Booru-like tagging

A booru (a term derived from the first of its kind, Danbooru) is essentially an image board that utilizes a non-hierarchical, semantic structure for organizing media. Instead of relying on a rigid folder tree, it leverages a powerful, community-driven (or personally curated) tagging system. Here is a breakdown of why this model is dramatically better than the folder-based approach:

The first benefit is that one image is not limited to one folder; it can have dozens of descriptive tags. The “dog on a beach at sunset” can be tagged with dog, beach, sunset, golden_retriever, landscape, and summer. This eliminates the need for duplicate files and allows a single image to be instantly discoverable from countless perspectives. Also, tags can describe everything from the subject (character name, object), the style (oil painting, cel-shaded), the context (safe, explicit), the artist, and the source material (copyright). This level of detail is impossible to replicate with a practical folder structure.

The second benefit is the sheer power of the precise filtering: Instead of browsing, you search. You can instantly filter an entire collection of thousands of images by combining and excluding tags. For example, a search like (beach AND sunset) NOT dog will immediately return all images of beaches at sunset that do not feature a dog.

Such features are impossible with a folder based system without serious abstraction by a third-party program.

Okay, you convinced me. How can I use it?

The good news is, the solution exists for your personal collection! The bad news is that it requires a little effort. Since big tech hasn’t caught up yet, the best options are powerful, self-hosted applications like Hydrus Network or the web-based Shimmie. While setting them up is a small hurdle—often the price of using the most advanced tool—the reward is a gallery that will never suck again. Who will be the lucky dev to make this process one-click and make billions? Who knows, kekw.