This is about the holding tag, which is tagged whenever a character is holding an object.

It's messy at the moment, largely because it's been confused with various *_grab tags. Mostly by one tagger.

I've been sorting it out while working on other things. And holding by itself seems very ambiguous: although it can combined with other tags ("holding camera", "holding microphone", "holding hat"), such searches don't work well. For instance, "holding camera" finds results where there's a camera in the room but the character is holding something else.

So I think it could benefit from additional subtags. The only existing one is holding_weapon, and even that one was underused.

Here's the ones that Danbooru uses:

• holding_glasses
• holding_bra
• holding_hat
• holding_shoes
• holding_panties
• holding_skirt
• holding_fork
• holding_spoon
• holding_book
• holding_card
• holding_condom
• holding_fishing_rod
• holding_flower
• holding_fruit
• holding_gift
• holding_poke_ball

(You'd think that there wouldn't be enough tags for holding_poke_ball, but Danbooru has over 1500 of those. It's pretty common here too.)

What (if any) subtags do you think would be useful? I don't want to go around creating new tags without any kind of consensus. Personally, I'd say that holding_gift would be a good one. Maybe some of the clothing tags too.

Holding_tail

Which isn't necessarily the same as tail_grab, that one's more forceful and usually doesn't sound very right on solo occasions where someone merely has their own tail in their hands.

I think that holding by itself is just to broad to be useful, and like you said, searching for holding and whatever object is unreliable at best. I think we should maybe alias it away once we've added these sub tags. Who's going to just search for holding? Or blacklist it?

But yes, I definitely approve of these sub tags. All the ones I could think of to add either already exist, or have better, more specific names. Will continue to think about it and reply if anything good comes to mind. Holding_gift does sound good though.

Hm.. The more I think about it, the less useful it seems.

Danbooru uses holding as an umbrella tag, because there's so many things that can be held, and trying to cover everything with separate tags would get too cluttery. But on the other hand, having a tag that basically amounts to "held things" seems useless.

So yeah, maybe we could invalidate holding someday. But first we would need a good set of subtags that covers the things that users would want to search for.

How about holding_sex_toy as one addition? There's so many posts where those are just lying around unused, that narrowing down the searches could be useful.

holding penis please

Genjar said:
Hm.. The more I think about it, the less useful it seems.

Danbooru uses holding as an umbrella tag, because there's so many things that can be held, and trying to cover everything with separate tags would get too cluttery. But on the other hand, having a tag that basically amounts to "held things" seems useless.

So yeah, maybe we could invalidate holding someday. But first we would need a good set of subtags that covers the things that users would want to search for.

How about holding_sex_toy as one addition? There's so many posts where those are just lying around unused, that narrowing down the searches could be useful.

Perhaps we could break holding down into large chunks? Like maybe holding_object, holding_body_part, and possibly holding_creature? I dunno, I still think it might just be better off gone. But yeah, we need those sub tags first.

Holding_sex_toy makes sense to me, as well as holding_penis. I think that hand_bra might already be the tag to use for this, but what about holding_boobs?

Tokaido said:
Holding_sex_toy makes sense to me, as well as holding_penis. I think that hand_bra might already be the tag to use for this, but what about holding_boobs?

Holding penis exists already, but it gets confused with penis_grab all the time. Corgi Bread cleaned it up a few months ago, and it's already as badly mixed up as it was before that..

Holding breasts also exists, and often overlaps with presenting breasts. I was mostly referring to holding items in the opening, since we already seem to have a good set for various bodyparts.

Edit: As for the holding_sex_toy tag... I checked and tagged few pages of sex toys, and it's surprisingly rare for anyone to be handling those. In most images, the toys are lying around unused or already inserted but not manually used. The tag looks useful, especially for narrowing down searches. So if someone objects to it, please speak up before I start tagging those en masse.