Friendlier file names for downloaded images

Varka (Spokesdragon) 3 years ago • updated by Vas 5 months ago 38

Right now, when you click 'download', the image is saved as a long string of random numbers/letters, a lot like e621. It'd be great if this was changed to make the filename more useful - say, adding the name of the user who uploaded/drew it, and the title of the piece as well.



This is something we should definitely implement.

Quick question - what should the filename be? I'd be interested to hear what kind of filename structure people would recommend / prefer. If you could thumbs-up the file name formats posted in response to this message if you support it, that way I can get a better feel for which ones are preferred!


Including the id (https://beta.furrynetwork.com/artwork/id/artwork-title) in the filename could be handy as well so that I may find the page I downloaded the picture from.

This is an awesome idea!

This is extremely important!


This is going to be in for launch!


Heyaa Varka!

I also ask you to let the server create better file names like it was/is on Furaffinity, please.

It's important for archiving pictures:

Artistname_title of the picture

But I read you planed this for launch. When will the launch be? (Just to know :P)

PS: But I want to thank you very much so far for FurryNetwork. It has great potential to replace Furaffinity with some more improvements.

Definitely glad to read that this will be done eventually.


I just wanted to open this suggestion, good thing I searched for it first XD

Yeah, filenames are very important I guess. Having the artist name and a decent image name in the file should be mandatory.

for example this image: https://beta.furrynetwork.com/artwork/502249/winter-is-coming/fullscreen

You could easily generate the name from the address:

<artist name ()>_<number ()>_<image name()>



I'd rather it was <number ()>_<artist name ()>_<image name()> myself.

That happens to be what FA and IB do, but the reason I like it is because it's easy to strip the number off as I'm saving the image and can be done via macro (as the number of digits is relatively constant, whereas the other two are not).

The other advantage of ID-first is that sorting by name will sort them correctly by upload order, at least assuming it's some kind of incrementing field.


Those numbers FA has are in fact (supposed to be) unix timestamps, you can use an online converter to change that to a real date. Google "epochconverter".

It will always tell you the year and month and minutes right, and usually the day depending on when it was posted, but for whatever reason the "Posted" hour seems to be differing every day from the GMT date with an arbitrary amount of hours (~2-10h), even after accounting for time zone difference, so I have no idea what's up with that. Skimpy coding, probably.

You can use this info to put a date on your saved FA files, EXIF data may not always reflect when the artist decided to finally publish it.

Clarification, crappy coding on FA's servers' side, the epoch converter works fine.

The difference is most likely caused by time zone being changed on FA's server. That is, they don't bother to convert to UTC or a specific time zone, just use the default one. And in case of posted time, they do bother. Well, I suspect.


So glad this will be a thing, it's so very important.


I'd suggest:




If that's a no-go, perhaps:



But having at least part of the title embedded in the file name would be nice.


1.) '_' instead of spaces

2.) automatically remove troublesome special characters like '?', '/', '$' and other poorly supported characters

3.) support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean letters

4*.) if title/filename is used, please try to keep file name under 64 chars (about 36 characters available for name + title/filename) due to trouble with copying files on Windows if path too long


+1 to this, but I think, for sorting's sake, ID or Date should always be first.


I too am leaning towards date first :3

If dates are included (which I don't find particularly useful, but whatever), I'm against adding noise like minutes and seconds. Time tends to be random and just reflect artist's time zone rather than anything useful. If you want to sort by time, submission id is much more reliable anyway, as it's guaranteed to be unique.

Original file names are a bad idea, as many artsts don't bother to name properly, plus original file names often enough leak private information. I've seen many times "anonymous" art with artist's and commissioner's names in the file name on FA or IB. Generating file names from submission titles is much more reliable and safe.

Limit of filenames in Windows is 260 characters, so if a filename longer than 100 characters causes you poblems, you may want to consider using less deeply nested folders. :D

I'm ok with using the submission name as a file name, just so long as it's not "3a28d920c0918a0f9812908e091890dcd098a0989dc.png"


This is something we should definitely implement.



I prefer artistname_submissiontitle_date_uniqueID

I disagree with date first as it's rare I want to look at what all happened at a specific time. Personally I like grouping things by artist.

Think of it this way. I know an artist I like, so I go looking in my art folder for their stuff. Artist name first lets me do that easily. Now say they've produced a comic I like, so I have their submissions ordered by title under their name so I can view the entire comic without the need for folders.

The addition of a date is there for people who want to know that.

The unique ID at the end, instead of the beginning like FA (which is really annoying to strip off), guards against same file submission names, which happens a lot.

Oh. Side comment. Can we please not do a download button that automatically tells the browser "just save this"? Because that goes into my downloads folder (I am not asked for a destination) and that's not where I want to put stuff. (see: Weasyl)

I definitly agree with this.



The format that I manually change the file names to, and have been most helpful for me is:

Artist name (Submission name) ID# Original file name.ext

I manually add the artist and then submission name as I sort my art by file name.


Yeah, that's why I want artist name first. I don't care too much about the ID, so I have a macro that just strips it off when I save stuff from FA. There's the occasional file name conflict (because Ruaidri and a few others don't give their images unique file names, Ru's are a lot of "x004.png" and such) but I can handle those manually just fine.

I title all of my files with the expectation that they may be downloaded, e.g. "Ransom - Picture Title.png"

I'd be okay with just letting it be downloaded with its original file name. Alternatively, if you must rename it, I think it should be "Artist Name - Submission Title"


I can live with whatever format as long as it has the artist, title/filename, and ID.

I haven't found date ever to be too important and art can still be ordered chronologically with ID (well if its at the beginning or through some script/program). For Furaffinity I strip all the metadata from the submission pages and populate the files with metadata using a lightroom plugin I wrote, so filename isn't toooo important for me, although I haven't written any such scripts for FN.

Actually from a utility standpoint artist-id-title would allow for grouping of artists and order them chronologically when sorting by file name.

While I'm more used to id-artist-title naming, I think artist-id-title has an advantage of grouping by artists, which is more useful than sorting by submission date, so I support your idea. How do you store metadata by the way? In files themselves or externally? In what format? (Sorry if mentioning Lightroom is supposed to answer my questions. I don't use it and don't know its capabilities.)

I initially generate the metadata as JSON with my javascript scraper which is formatted like this . Then I extract the image links from the json file with a Lua script, load them up into a download manager(JDownloader2).

Once that's done I import the files into lightroom and my plugin compares file names in the catalog to the ones in the json file and applies the relevant metadata to file. The metadata is stored as keywords in the catalog linked to the image and as certain xmp fields if appropriate (like title, description, artist). Once i'm satisfied I have lightroom write the metadata into the actual images in the xmp format.

So that's how I do things. The whole process is kind of cobbled together atm, but it works. :p

It's great being able to search through my favorites and have all the information right there.


Submission#-Artist-Title.extension would work best I'd say, I occasionaly like sorting my downloaded art by artists.

Also, right now saving art can produce three different files:

Clicking the download button gives you a string of characters

Clicking Save As on the submission page yields 2500x1500.png

and Clicking Save As while viewing the submission just gives you index.png.

Would be nice if all three actions gave the same result.


Names should only be the same if files are the same. If I accidentally save a thumbnail or a half-res preview, I'd prefer it to have a recognizable postfix like "-thumb" or "-preview". If an image is small enough to not require downloading to view in full resolution, then and only then file names can be the same (if devs decide to implement it).


.... what? 3 years ago this was marked as planned and no one's done it yet? All the ideas I see on the site here are 3 years old and nothing's been done. Is this site even alive anymore? I came here to post this exact idea and here it is, 3 years old.

By and large, FurryNetwork failed both as a general furry artwork website and elite portfolio showcase website, so there's no point in investing heavy resources into it.

FN's owners seem to be looking into implementing art freelancer tools, something which has seen many failed implementations too, though it must be noted that this time it'll be something similar to Upwork, with extra fees and arbitration, rather than just a simple tool for helping artists and commissioners to find each other, so no idea how successful it will be.

If someone would hack FA again then people would get angry and spread out from FA for a while, this site would get more attention again. :/ FA sucks, needs to be replaced. But nope, everyone stays there because the artists stay because the users stay because the artists stay becau....

If FA is hacked yet again, nothing will happen, as usual. For a website to attract a large portion of FA's user base, FA needs to be shut down completely, which, as much as I dislike FA, I hope won't happen. FA sucks, but frankly, it sucks a bit less than before and it going down will be even worse.

Seems like every furry community is run by corrupt people, dictatorish people, or just lazy people. Kinda sucks. I had hopes for FN too. Went and made a rantish journal about it on my FN page.