# Overview For Getting Started - hydrus network
A personal booru-style media tagger that can import files and tags from your hard drive and popular websites. Content can be shared with other users via user-run servers.

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# Overview for getting started

This page serves as a checklist or overview for the getting started part of Hydrus. It is recommended to read at least all of the getting started pages, but if you want to head to some specific section directly go ahead and do so.

## The client

Have a look at getting started with files to get an overview of the Hydrus client.

## Local files

If you already have many local files, either downloaded by hand or by some other downloader tool, head to the getting started importing section to begin importing them.

## Downloading

If you want to download with Hydrus, check out getting started with downloading. If you want to add the ability to download from sites not already available in Hydrus by default, check out adding new downloaders for how and a link to a user-maintained archive of downloaders.

## Tags and ratings

If you have imported and/or downloaded some files and want to get started searching and tagging see searching and sorting and getting started with ratings.

It is also worth having a look at siblings for when you want to consolidate different tags that all mean the same thing, common misspellings, or preferential differences into one tag.

Parents are for when you want a tag to always add another tag. Commonly used for characters since you would usually want to add the series they're from too.

## Duplicates

Have a lot of very similar looking pictures because of one reason or another? Have a look at duplicates, Hydrus' duplicates finder and filtering tool.

## API

Hydrus has an API that lets external tools connect to it. See API for how to turn it on and a list of some of these tools.

September 7, 2022