Feedback requested: how do you use autotag?

General Discussions
1

Hi folks. I’m planning on doing a redesign of the autotag system in the near future. To help inform the design, I’d like to know the following around how you use autotag:

  • what is your typical workflow when using the autotag feature? Outline the circumstances and steps you go through when running auto tag.
  • what are your folder structures and typical filename that you use to perform auto tagging?
  • are there any particular pain points or specific frictions involved with using the auto tag feature?

Given that I’m expecting the design to be a fairly large departure from the existing behaviour, I’d like to avoid discussions around suggested fixes/features for the time being. I’ll request feedback on the design once I have that ready.

Thanks for your assistance :slight_smile:

1 Like
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I use it for just about everything.

At a system level all my files are automatically ingested, sharded and prefixed with a naming convention. I create a tag with the name I want but use an alias to identify the files and its respective shard/fragment directory tree. so movie(Shard-12)(Fragment S1-9).mp4

Tag name: Shard-12(Crystal)
Alias: Shard-12

Tag Name: Fragment 9(Misty)
Alias: S1-9

I then run auto tag and now i know exactly which shard and fragment each file belongs too which also gives me access in stash to other data i can filter for such as individual shard and fragment sizes.

studios same thing different entity, jav I will have the true studio name ‘Lunatics’ for example then alias the studio code ie: LULU, this will automatically tag all my lunatic entries to the right studio/code

I also use it for Aggregated mass tagging. For example I have self promoted content like onlyfans, fansly, patreon etc under one studio but I alias so I can identify all of them as my content always has the source prefixed in the file name.

Tag Name: Self Promotion
Alias: Fansly
Alias: Patreon
Alias: Onlyfans

mycontent(onlyfans).mp4

I rarely use it for performer tags or scene tags unless im auto tagging for a performer name. tagging by fields like “big ass” “big tits” pollutes the metadata.

Candice Dare - mike adriano.mp4

Galleries i have not found or had a specific use case. but with how granular I have made my tags and DB its completely essential.

Edit: one last thing regarding pain point. I have to be pretty surgical when running this feature. there is no way to undo (easily) or exclude. so when I click that button im willing to gamble on it.

2 Likes
4

Primary use case

Bulk tagging images/galleries with performer or studio matches. There can be hundreds or thousands of images that would match to a performer or studio. Autotag can save a lot of time here if I’m certain the autotag string is unique.

Workflow

  • Autotag is only triggered from the performer or studio detail pages
  • It’s always applied per object, never run as a global task
  • I’m only autotagging performer or studios that I am confident are unique strings that wouldn’t generate false-positives
    • If I am unsure, I’ll type the performer or studio string in an image or gallery view filter to confirm, but at this point it’s generally easier to bulk edit from that view instead of using autotag.

Paint Points

Determining if there will be false-positives prior to execution is non trivial (see above).

This could be alleviated by adding a dry-run preview of all matches in the autotag confirmation modal. Within the modal the list of matches could be rendered within a fixed-height scrollable container to ensures large results sets remain navigable without expanding the modal beyond viewport constraints.

Filesystem structure

videos/
  sites/
    {studio-hierarchy}/{date}-{performer}-{title}.ext   # or some combination of this
  movies/
    full-length/
    split-scenes/
images/
  sites/
    {studio-hierarchy}/{date}-{performer}-{title}.zip   # or some combination of this
  performers/
    {performer name}/*.(jpg|gif|etc)
  random/*.jpg|gif|etc
downloads/
  videos/
  images/
1 Like
5

Thanks for taking on this initiative :slight_smile:

My primary use case is also for images, clips and galleries. Specifically those from performer social media and fans-style content.

Since I don’t bother trying to scrape and archive metadata from things like IG posts, I’ve just stuck with a basic scan + auto tag workflow. My new media is always placed correctly in the filesystem such that it’ll match performer and studio (platform) name.

The single most helpful function for me would be a reliable way to iterate through performer aliases and match unique ones. Often times performers have a handful of different social media handles to keep track of. I understand this gets messy when trying to account for uniqueness.

2 Likes
6

The single most helpful function for me would be a reliable way to iterate through performer aliases and match unique ones. Often times performers have a handful of different social media handles to keep track of. I understand this gets messy when trying to account for uniqueness.

I’d like this too. It would be nice to be able to trigger autotag with a specific alias. That would get around the issue of performers having a common alias (e.g. first name only).

Right now I need to change the performer’s name and then swap it back if I want to use autotag for aliases.

7

what is your typical workflow when using the autotag feature? Outline the circumstances and steps you go through when running auto tag.

My content doesn’t utilize stash boxes. I’ve written some scripts that help manage content like a scraper to read the metadata I add to videos downloaded via yt-dlp. After each scan, I run auto tag since it adds tags, studios, and performers to my scenes, images, and galleries. Then I run identify with my scraper to add metadata to scenes.

what are your folder structures and typical filename that you use to perform auto tagging?

.
└── content/
    ├── asian/
    │   └── waveya/
    │       ├── ari
    │       ├── miu
    │       └── ari and miu
    └── patreon/
        ├── Performer Name/
        │   ├── sets
        │   └── vid
        └── Second Performer/
            ├── ass
            ├── body/
            │   └── bikini
            ├── sets/
            │   ├── Red Bikini
            │   └── Valentines 2026
            ├── tits
            └── vid

An example of how I organize content.

I have an asian tag, a waveya studio, and Ari and Miu performers. In pics/vids where they’re together, I’ll put it in the ari and miu folder since Auto Tag will add both performers to the content.

I’ll use Performer Name as a directory that directly matches the performer name, and inside it, I’ll have sub directories of pics where the focus is on a specific body part (ass/body/tits). The sets directory is where my galleries go where related scenes and images are created. If I have a Valentines tag, the Valentines 2026 directory is auto tagged. The vid directory will sometimes have a similar structure to how I organize pics, but it depends on how much I like the performer.

As for filenames, I keep them as they are downloaded so I don’t duplicate content.

are there any particular pain points or specific frictions involved with using the auto tag feature?

Kinda, but it’s to be expected given the nature of a bulk automation tool. I guess I don’t know what the intentions are behind this redesign – what are you looking to do/fix that you don’t like about the current situation?

8

I organize media into folders with tags/performer names. This generally works well but the biggest miss is media metadata like titles and details not being included in the auto-tag. I rely on scrapers to get video descriptions and titles, many of which contain tag names which aren’t picked up by the auto tagger.

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Apologies this is just vomiting on a post I’ll come back and fix it to make it more coherent later.

I always use it to tag performers in bulk for images, scenes etc. I have a filter to find me any performers with single names, then have to go find any that aren’t unique and turn them off for autotag manually, or mark them as unique so they’re ignored from my search in the future.

I use it from the performer page, from the studio page, across the whole library (usually for performers only, or select tags). Or just to a folder I have added. I have files that will often be named with the username for the site they were on (OnlyFans or redgifs or wherever) and they could have multiple usernames per performer. I often have to flip an alias to the main name, run auto-tag and back again (sometimes for several aliases). Lots of times it doesn’t work when the name they used as an alias, and in my files, doesn’t match the primary name so that’s a huge pain point. I try to put them in a folder with the site they were from and username/stage name as well.

One of the issues is it only looks at the primary name, not aliases, I’d like to ignore or not each alias individually (maybe enabling them manually with default off for any single names), as some are unique and some are not. This matters a deal when you have say performers using one name on onlyfans, another in mainstream etc.

Galleries should always ‘roll up’ performers, eg, if they’re in an image in the gallery, they should be tagged to the gallery (but not roll down, automatically at least - as sometimes galleries have multiple performers in them that aren’t all in every photo.)

Being able to auto-tag based on a search would be good too, at the moment you have to do a search, select everything with the largest page that won’t crash your browser, tag everything, then iterate through each page. Selective auto-tag is something I run a lot when adding a folder of content, often with studios and performers, I’d like to do tags more but I need to be careful as a lot of tags are too generic and I haven’t got enough ignored - a default of being ignored when adding new tags might be helpful. Being able to add a tag to a performers scenes after a certain date automatically, really useful, maybe they changed their hair etc.

I try and have everything with filenames (best) or folders with at least performers and ideally studio in it.

Tags I just haven’t found a good workflow, so many are too generic. Ideally I would like the ability to auto add tags when a performer or studio is added, since some tags are going to always be the case anything with that performer or studio.

I also tag studios, and here have more problems, I’ve followed FansDB’s naming convention as much as I can to tag studios. But Stash DB’s convention of using the performer name for a studio is problematic as it winds up auto-tagging every scene that performer is in with their own studio.

The filename parser is a great help sometimes, but it’s also a pain to use because it’s disconnected from all the other search tools, so I can use it to find a certain pattern, but then only apply it 1000 at a time, and then I can’t say, use this pattern with things that I’ve already tagged to this studio, or subset of studios, or files added this week etc.

I often have a folder of mixed files I’ll add and want to bulk auto-tag that whole folder. I’ll also add a performer and want to go back through files I already have to find any with them in it.

As for an undo feature, it would be great to have all tag associations (or performer / studio associations) have a date they were made. So for instance you could see a tag as a playlist by date the performer/tag was added to that file (and remove the ones that have been made since x for example, or before x date), you can kind of get close with using last updated, but it’s not the same as it will move chronologically, any time any other tag is added. I will occasionally find a case where it has tagged incorrectly, and I’ll have to go in and manually sort things out. It’s still a heap quicker than not using auto-tag. It could be quite painful with thousands of photos though.

Also auto-tag has problems with say filename+has+performer+name+in+it.jpg , it will not find performer name. But filename-has-performer-name-in-it.jpg will work. performer-name9.jpg won’t work, but performer-name-9.jpg will. There might be cases where for each alias you want to say ‘ignore numbers and symbols entirely and match performer name to 4performer9name23%.jpg and other times their username might be performer name 23 and you want to find that.

There can also be the case of having performer-name-lastname and performer-name, and you might want to match performer-name only if peformer-name-lastname doesn’t match. Or remove the larger matches from the string you’re testing against before testing the shorter name. Maybe that way ‘Jane’ would never match if you had already matched ‘Jane Doe’ even if you forgot to ignore ‘Jane’.

Auto tag might also do well to look in descriptions, sometimes a bulk import or stash match might have a performer name or something in the scene description, but that will never get picked up by auto-tag.

There’s also the ‘and’ case, eg ‘name -fdgdfgdfg - gfdfg onlyfans.jpg’ you might want to set a studio of ‘name (OnlyFans)’ if both things are in the filename, or sometimes even create it from scratch based on the folder/filename if it’s in the right format.

TLDR; there’s lots of things within a folder/filename that could indicate it should have a performer/tag/studio added, more than just a single name used per performer/brand, but a combination and/or of matches or regexes. Some specific performers aliases you might want to be more permissive since it’s a very unique username if it appears anywhere it’s relevant, while others are fairly generic names you might only want if they appear exactly without any prepended/appended characters of any kind except spaces or only within a specific studio etc.

10

I still organize performers by unique names, especially for OF models. Whenever downloading new content from them, I would run auto tag only on their performer page. I wish I could auto tag only specific folders so that would be a great feature to have.

make it so we could specify folders that auto tag should run on instead of scanning the entire data base. Thanks.

11

@bobcatmango You can already do this: selective auto tag :slight_smile:

12

Many thanks for the responses so far. I’ll have more details on what I plan to do at a later date, but this has been very helpful determining use cases to cover. :heart:

13

I wish I would have read this thread. I used Scene Renamer by Studio, performer, etc. It renamed all my non stash id’ed files to FC2 {resolution). I had to nuke my intial instance and restore from a backup. Now I’m adding performer by performer and entering metadata religiously.

14

I tag my video files with [Tag] in the name. What annoys me is that I have to use a plugin to transfer this Namen tags into Stash Tags and add them in the Stash database to the file. And the plugin is complicated to use, so it is a work I have to consider, at what point the extra work is justfied.

15

I use it frequently for Studios and Performers, always selectively tagging the folder(s) with the new content. It caused me some grief earlier on when I didn’t understand it wouldn’t disambiguate the single performer names. Since then I have been more cautious. Perhaps you could add a toggle to exclude single performer names with a regex?

But either way I think the warnings are pretty prominent now, and with selective tag as an option the only difficulty with the tool is educating users on what it will do.

16

I use autotag:

  • For performers/studios if they’re in the filename
  • Since I’m using Docker, I fake some of the paths to apply tags via autotag
    • For example, both stash-vr and stash-vr-companion require the export_deovr tag to allow scenes to be visible to VR apps, so for VR scenes, I include that tag in the path
    • Same with the FLAT tag and some of the other VR tags
  • For some performers, I also include the performer name as part of the path so autotag properly tags them

I skimmed this thread, but didn’t see anyone faking their paths via Docker specifically for autotag. Happy to go into greater detail if there’s interest!