The Tag Management thread

General Discussions
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Always a great source of debate ‘What’s the best way to use tags?’ - There isn’t one, there’s just different ways!

Personally I’ve avoided the rabbit hole of curating, managing & generally faffing with tags as 100% of my Stash is on StashDB I’m relying on the community to do the heavy lifting for me :innocent:

I’m always intrigued by those that like to deep dive into personalising their tags & curate in minute detail.

It’ll be great to see some tips, tricks & strategies that people are applying to their own Stashes …

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so trouble is most of the tags on stashdb are all just scraped from the sites they come from which is mostly fine especially after some heavy lifting from @AdultSun but we do get these edge cases where the tag one site uses might not line up with the way another site uses it and becomes a whole mess

usually it comes down to two things, curated tags or scraped tags. Either you manually tag all your stuff yourself or you just let the scrapes handle it and just try and deal with any weird collisions/aliases

there is a secret third option for local stash’s where you can do both and have your own personal tags just for curation say something like My Tag: TagName but that does not lend itself to nicely submitting to a stash-box

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Are you using the ‘secret third option’ or mostly using the 'Adultsun Approved’™ approach?

I’m just generally intrigued on levels of micro management people apply. I use tags solely for what’s included in the content but there’s people potentially using them in the opposite direction (No Anal for example) & all sorts of things.

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The third option is just to be able to use both and an easy way to differentiate the tags you added vs the tags that might have been added via stashdb or a scrape if you wanted to curate all your tags you can technically do both you just need to qualify the tags for easy searching and identification

I personally do something like this with Tags that interest me, but the majority of my tags are from scrapes, I try to keep all the tags unique to their scrape source and then merge them into an appropriate tag as an alias, its a bunch more work but helps with the conflict

Say for example one studio uses Blonde to refer to Male and Female performers and others just for Female. I would have two tags in stash and each studio would map to the correct one because the scrape would come back like studio_a:Blonde or studio_b:Blonde which I have aliases for in the tags in stash

as for just organizing in stash I use the prefix method that AS uses where all the top level tags that I merge aliases into have prefixes for categories or just sorting that are manipulated by a userscript to change the color of the tag and remove the prefix

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This is making for some interesting reading so I’ll throw in my 2c (perhaps as devil’s advocate) as someone who follows stashdb for integration and adhering to a source of truth to sync to

I have every stash tag Category under a c: prefix with my own sub-categories that I keep locally for organization and structure. I have 110 of these tags and ~20 tags for meta-management, everytthing else follows or is synced to stashdb at my earliest convenience

eg:

c:Accessories
c:Accessories: External Stimulation
c:Accessories: Furniture
c:Accessories: Insertion
c:Accessories: Pain
c:Accessories: Penis
c:Accessories: Restraint
c:Accessories: Texture
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I try to curate my own set of tags.. but when I single scrape or do batch scrapes sometimes stashdb tags find their way into my tag list. When this happens, I try to add a regex for excluded tags and then alias most of the stashdb tags into my own curated tags.. No muss, no fuss.

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I want ham on creating tags when I first got Stash, and very quickly burned out on actually applying them.

Initially I was also maintaining image assets for them on-creation, but the program I was using to generate the images really didn’t like how many jpgs/pngs I had in the library (since I was using a tool to consistently make them the same size and shape) - and the file containing the first 200-250 icons corrupted, which really killed a lot of my motivation (although I had fortunately exported them all).

I still intend to create assets for all of them when I’m “finished”, but I’m still scraping my way through an 8TB collection - and long-gone are the days when I was manually tagging every scene. Now I just import most of the scraped tags, and then every couple of days I go in and merge/manually rename/categories the imported tags (so all the different ways studios describe a threesome are only a single tag in my system).

I’m not happy with my category tree, though; and I’m not happy with some of the decisions I made early on, which will likely require a lot of effort to revise. Something like “Dildo”, which beginner-me envisioned because a category full of “Cismale inserts dildo in anus”, wasn’t prepared for when I encountered vaginal dildo usage, and oral dildo usage, or even non-penatrative dildo usage, and whether the performer is doing it themselves or if someone is doing it to them. I substantially underestimated the scope for so many of my early categories.

I’m gay, and so my initial tags “assume all interactions are between two cismales with a penis and an anus” - but as I trawled through my collection, it quickly became apparent that I neglected to factor the fact I have straight and bi porn in my collection too, as well as porn that features transmen and transwomen, and even nullos/bodily-modified individuals. “Fisting” should have probably been “Anal Fisting” from the start - and while that one was an easy fix, others weren’t. I have such an internal conflict on whether I should distinguish Anal (MM) from Anal (MF) from Anal (FM) from Anal (MT) and so on, or whether I should use two separate tags and assume I’ll search for Anal+MM in the future. But then you get situations where if Anal (MM) and Blowjob (MF) appears in the scene, Anal+MF wouldn’t know that the MF doesn’t relate to the Anal. And then I also feel a pang of social/moral guilt for wanting to distinguish Ciswoman Vaginal content from Transman Vaginal content. Referring back to the gay thing, I’m also very unlikely to actually use tags relating to acts performed by ciswomen - but I still feel compelled to label them.

Beginner-me also made the awful decision that I wouldn’t tag videos with appearance-based tags (i.e. I wouldn’t apply age/hair colour/tattoos/etc to scenes). My category tree at the time had performer-tags and scene-tags. Stupid, stupid-me neglected to even consider that people age; that people dye their hair; that people go bald; that people get tattoos. A performer having tattoos in 2025 doesn’t mean all their videos contain a performer with tattoos.

Some part of me really wishes that tags innately had “tiers”, like adding extra toppings to a pizza - to distinguish something that happens once from something that is the entire premise of the scene. Like… “Someone’s toes get sucked during a single position” versus “this entire video is about foot play”. I dunno, if I had access to this I would probably still be frustrated several months later. I think my frustration is just that past-me has to make decisions that present-me will still agree with, all the while knowing future-me will also have criticisms. Striving for scalable/future-proof, and failing.

This is probably just a case of my neurodivergent/human need to put things in neat boxes, but just like the rest of human experience/life - it doesn’t actually fit into boxes, and the more granular you get in order to categorize the edge-cases, the less useful it is to even think of them as being in boxes. When you get to the point that you have a category for every individual thing: they might as well be uncategorized. But knowing this doesn’t stop me wanting to find the perfect category tree.

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Tags are the way I sort my stuff. I don’t use many of them, just “surface-level” ones. The default views for scenes and images are set so that only items without a tag are displayed. This way, the default views function as an inbox. From there, I add the corresponding tags, and they are removed from the default view. To show items from different categories, I added some extra saved views that filter items with specific tags. The advantage is that content with multiple categories appears in my saved views.
Slightly off-topic, but it adds to that: I always name the files a specific way so I can use the search filter in Stash to narrow down what I’m looking for.

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