Alternatives to Hydrus Network
A personal booru-style tagging manager for large image and media collections, with optional user-run servers. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Hydrus Network
A personal booru-style tagging manager for large image and media collections, with optional user-run servers.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Hydrus Network.
digiKam
A photo manager built for libraries of a hundred thousand images, with face recognition, batch processing and heavy metadata support.
digiKam is a GPL photo manager for Windows, macOS and Linux with tag, label, date and geolocation search plus face tagging, aimed at photo libraries rather than booru-style collections.
KPhotoAlbum
A KDE desktop app for tagging, describing and quickly searching large personal photo collections.
KPhotoAlbum is an open-source KDE app with a fast tagging workflow and searches combining people, places and custom categories, but it runs only on Linux.
Eagle
A desktop asset manager for collecting, tagging and searching images, design files and visual references.
Eagle is a paid Windows and macOS asset manager for collecting, tagging and searching images and design references, with AI-assisted organizing and no self-hosted server option.
Damselfly
A server-based photo management system for large folder-based collections, with fast search and keyword tagging.
Damselfly is a server-based manager for folder collections with keyword tagging, fast search and object detection, accessed through the web instead of a desktop client.
IMatch
A Windows digital asset management app for cataloging, tagging and searching large photo and media collections.
IMatch is a paid, Windows-only digital asset manager with standard-compliant metadata and an AI AutoTagger, suited to archivists who want metadata stored in standard fields.
Photo Supreme
Digital asset management software for cataloging and searching large photo archives on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Photo Supreme is paid cataloging software for Windows, macOS and Linux that keeps existing folders and metadata and offers a server edition for shared catalogs.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
ExifTool
Reads, writes and edits metadata in almost every image, audio and video format there is, and is the reference tool for the job.
XnView MP
Views, converts and organises images in more than five hundred formats, free for personal use.
Tonfotos
A desktop photo organizer for family archives with face recognition, duplicate finding and phone import.
Excire Foto
An AI photo organizer for Windows and macOS that tags, searches and culls local photo libraries.
