booru-viewer

A booru client for people who keep what they save and rice what they run.

Qt6 desktop app for Linux and Windows. Browse, search, and archive Danbooru, e621, Gelbooru, and Moebooru. Fully themeable.

Screenshot

Linux — Styled via system Qt6 theme

Supports custom styling via custom.qss — see Theming.

Features

booru-viewer has three tabs that map to three commitment levels: Browse for live search against booru APIs, Bookmarks for posts you've starred for later, Library for files you've actually saved to disk.

Browsing — Danbooru, e621, Gelbooru, and Moebooru. Tag search with autocomplete, rating/score/media-type filters, blacklist with backfill, infinite scroll, page cache, keyboard grid navigation, multi-select with bulk actions, drag thumbnails out as files.

Preview — Image zoom/pan, GIF/APNG/WebP animation, video via mpv (stream from CDN, seamless loop, seek, volume), ugoira auto-conversion, color-coded tag categories in info panel.

Popout — Dedicated viewer window. Arrow/vim keys navigate posts during video. Auto-hiding overlay UI. F11 fullscreen, Ctrl+H hide UI, Ctrl+P privacy screen. Syncs bidirectionally with main grid.

Bookmarks — Star posts for later. Folder organization, tag search, bulk save/remove, JSON import/export.

Library — Save to disk with metadata indexing. Customizable filename templates (%id%, %artist%, %md5%, etc). Folder organization, tag search, sort by date/name/size.

Search — Inline history dropdown, saved searches, session cache mode.

Install

Windows

Download booru-viewer-setup.exe from Releases and run the installer. It installs to AppData with Start Menu and optional desktop shortcuts. To update, just run the new installer over the old one. Your data in %APPDATA%\booru-viewer\ is preserved.

Github: /pxlwh/booru-viewer/releases

Gitea: /pax/booru-viewer/releases

Windows 10 dark mode is automatically detected and applied.

Linux

Requires Python 3.11+ and pip. Most distros ship Python but you may need to install pip and the Qt6 system libraries.

Arch / CachyOS:

sudo pacman -S python python-pip qt6-base mpv ffmpeg

Ubuntu / Debian (24.04+):

sudo apt install python3 python3-pip python3-venv mpv libmpv-dev ffmpeg

Fedora:

sudo dnf install python3 python3-pip qt6-qtbase mpv mpv-libs-devel ffmpeg

Then clone and install:

git clone https://git.pax.moe/pax/booru-viewer.git
cd booru-viewer
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

Run it:

booru-viewer

Or without installing: python3 -m booru_viewer.main_gui

Desktop entry: To add booru-viewer to your app launcher, create ~/.local/share/applications/booru-viewer.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=booru-viewer
Exec=/path/to/booru-viewer/.venv/bin/booru-viewer
Icon=/path/to/booru-viewer/icon.png
Type=Application
Categories=Graphics;

Hyprland integration

I daily-drive booru-viewer on Hyprland and I've baked in my own opinions on how the app should behave there. By default, a handful of hyprctl dispatches run at runtime to:

• Restore the main window's last floating mode + dimensions on launch
• Restore the popout's position, center-pin it around its content during navigation, and suppress F11 / fullscreen-transition flicker
• "Prime" Hyprland's per-window floating cache at startup so a mid-session toggle to floating uses your saved dimensions
• Lock the popout's aspect ratio to its content so you can't accidentally stretch mpv playback by dragging the popout corner

If you're a ricer with your own windowrules targeting class:^(booru-viewer)$ and you'd rather the app keep its hands off your setup, there are two independent opt-out env vars:

• BOORU_VIEWER_NO_HYPR_RULES=1 — disables every in-code hyprctl dispatch except the popout's keep_aspect_ratio lock. Use this if you want app-side window management out of the way but you still want the popout to size itself to its content.
• BOORU_VIEWER_NO_POPOUT_ASPECT_LOCK=1 — independently disables the popout's aspect ratio enforcement. Useful if you want to drag the popout to whatever shape you like (square, panoramic, monitor-aspect, whatever) and accept that mpv playback will letterbox or stretch to match.

For the full hands-off experience, set both:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=booru-viewer
Exec=env BOORU_VIEWER_NO_HYPR_RULES=1 BOORU_VIEWER_NO_POPOUT_ASPECT_LOCK=1 /path/to/booru-viewer/.venv/bin/booru-viewer
Icon=/path/to/booru-viewer/icon.png
Type=Application
Categories=Graphics;

Or for one-off launches from a shell:

BOORU_VIEWER_NO_HYPR_RULES=1 booru-viewer

Dependencies

• Python 3.11+
• PySide6 (Qt6)
• httpx
• Pillow
• python-mpv
• mpv

Keybinds

See KEYBINDS.md for the full list.

Adding Sites

File > Manage Sites. Enter a URL, click Auto-Detect, and save.

API credentials are optional — needed for Gelbooru and rate-limited sites.

Tested Sites

• danbooru.donmai.us
• gelbooru.com
• rule34.xxx
• safebooru.donmai.us
• safebooru.org
• e621.net

Theming

The app uses your OS native theme by default. To customize, copy a .qss file from the themes/ folder to your data directory as custom.qss:

• Linux: ~/.local/share/booru-viewer/custom.qss
• Windows: %APPDATA%\booru-viewer\custom.qss

A template is also available in Settings > Theme > Create from Template.

Six themes included, each in rounded and square variants. See themes/ for screenshots and the full QSS reference.

Settings

• General — page size, thumbnail size (100-200px), default site, default rating/score, prefetch mode (Off / Nearby / Aggressive), infinite scroll, unbookmark on save, search history, flip layout, popout monitor, popout anchor (resize pivot), file dialog platform
• Cache — max cache size, max thumbnail cache, auto-evict, clear cache on exit (session-only mode)
• Blacklist — tag blacklist with toggle, post URL blacklist
• Paths — data directory, cache, database, configurable library directory, library filename template
• Theme — custom.qss editor, template generator, CSS guide
• Network — connection log showing all hosts contacted this session

Data Locations

	Linux	Windows
Database	~/.local/share/booru-viewer/booru.db	%APPDATA%\booru-viewer\booru.db
Cache	~/.local/share/booru-viewer/cache/	%APPDATA%\booru-viewer\cache\
Library	~/.local/share/booru-viewer/saved/	%APPDATA%\booru-viewer\saved\
Theme	~/.local/share/booru-viewer/custom.qss	%APPDATA%\booru-viewer\custom.qss

To back up everything: copy saved/ for the files themselves and booru.db for bookmarks, folders, and tag metadata. The two are independent — restoring one without the other still works. The saved/ folder is browsable on its own in any file manager, and the database can be re-populated from the booru sites for any post IDs you still have on disk.

Privacy: No telemetry, analytics, or update checks. Only connects to booru sites you configure. Verify in Settings > Network.

Support

If you find this useful, consider buying me a coffee:

License

MIT