For browsing e621 on my phone I’ve been using e1547. I do not have anything against just browsing e621 directly on my browser, but a native app make it more… pleasant? I don’t know.
So I was thinking, is there any e621 client for desktop? Preferably a Linux desktop. I’ve made some Google searches, and I just found some dead projects on GitHub.
It can be made easily via their API, but depends on what features you’re looking for. What is it that you miss from the web version?
It’s possible that all the features I use in e1547 are directly available in e621, but I’m too lazy to look into it, that said, I love the ‘Subscriptions’ feature because I have a Mastodon-style feed with a constant stream of new drawings from my favorite artists (of whom there are probably hundreds). Also, I really like that because if I find an artist I like on e621 I can ‘follow’ them, whereas on e621 (which as far as I know, this feature doesn’t exist) I can just favorite them and if I want to look for them again I need to go through my favorites.
Another thing I like about e1547 is that I have 3 tabs, a “Home” tab where my default filters are applied, for example, at this moment my filters are ~digimon_(species), ~pokemon_(species), every time I open the app I will see the equivalent images that would appear if I search that manually, it’s not a big deal but it’s more comfortable. Then there is the “Hot” tab that uses the order:rank filter, great for finding new artists in my opinion, and finally there is the “Search” tab, where I can search for tags and they are not applied permanently unlike the “Home” tab.
I’m currently working on one.
A while ago I found myself frustrated with how limited e621’s search feature was. You can search for all of these tags, none of -these tags, and one or more of ~these tags, but there’s no way to search for either A or B, but not both, or (A AND B) OR C. I thought I could do better. So I did.
Obviously the e621 API isn’t going to be much help if you want to add search features the site doesn’t have, so that was a no go. Fortunately e621 lets you download a 1GB (compressed) CSV file (3GB decompressed!) containing a list of every post on the site along with its tags, favorite count, image URL etc. I made a program that would read in this database dump, take a search string like
all{ a 1-{ b c } 2{ d e f } 2-3{ g h i j } }(matching a, at least one of b and c, and exactly two of d, e, and f, and between two and three of g h i j) and spit out a list of image URLs that matched. It worked pretty well but was still kind of annoying to use, so I made it into a Discord bot. I also made a feature to let you search for pools based on the tags of the posts that are in them, e.g.[ human solo > werewolf solo ]matches pools with any post tagged human+solo and any post after that tagged werewolf+solo, useful for finding transformation sequences.The Discord bot works great, but shortly after developing it I realized that Discord is an absolutely atrocious platform for browsing images, and started work on a desktop version using the same code for searching. I’m planning on having the search run locally on the user’s machine rather than in the cloud, both for privacy reasons and so that I don’t have to host an API server. It’s pretty heavily optimized – a single search of the whole post database currently takes 1/20 of a second on my gaming laptop (6900X) and 3 seconds on my phone (Pixel 7a). I don’t have anything even remotely ready to publish GUI wise just yet, but the bot is ready to go. If anyone replies to this comment I’ll set up a Discord server with that bot and post updates about the desktop client there. The bot and desktop app are both GPLv3 and written in Rust, if that’s the sort of thing you care about.
That sounds interesting but I don’t use Discord. :(
Please let me know when you release the desktop client, or if you need someone to test it!
SixGrid appears to still be in active development if you’re interested.
I’ll take a look, thanks. :)
