Character Tag Trigger

If you prompt booru-style anime models - the Illustrious, NoobAI, Pony lineage - you know the pain: getting the exact character tag and the right artist trigger is half the battle, and every wrong guess costs you a generation. The Character Tag Trigger looks both up for you and drops the answer onto a wire as a ready-to-use prompt block. Type a character name, optionally an artist, and out comes the trigger tags.

This one caught me off guard, because it's not in the pack's README at all. It's a local database lookup hiding inside an otherwise all-about-images pack, and it's quietly one of the more useful things in there.

How it works

The node bundles a ~13 MB SQLite database (animadex.db, sitting in the pack's root) with about 36,000 characters and 15,000 artists, each row holding a Danbooru-style name, a Chinese name field, a trigger phrase, and (for characters) core_tags describing the design. Give it a character name and it queries that DB:

• Exact match on the English or Chinese name first, then falls back to a fuzzy LIKE %name% search.
• A hit returns the trigger phrase plus the character's core tags, comma-joined.
• If you also give it an artist, it appends that artist's trigger with an @ prefix - the @artist convention you see in booru prompting.

Result: a single tags string like hatsune miku, twin tails, ... plus , @some_artist if you asked for one. Wire that straight into your prompt text encoder. No network, no API key - it's a pure local lookup, which means it works offline and it's instant.

The inputs that matter

• character_name - the character to look up (default empty). Accepts English or Chinese names.
• artist_name - optional artist for the @artist trigger (default empty). Leave it blank and you just get the character block.

One output: tags (STRING), the comma-joined block ready for the prompt.

Installing it

Same pack as everything else: comfyui_image_embeddings by baijunty. ComfyUI Manager → search "image_embeddings" → install → restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/baijunty/comfyui_image_embeddings

No extra dependencies - it's just Python's built-in sqlite3.

Where people get burned

The fuzzy fallback is a double-edged sword. If your character name is slightly off, the node takes the first LIKE match, which may be a different character entirely. Check the output before you run with it - a wrong character tag is worse than no tag.

Also remember this is a static snapshot. The DB is bundled with the pack and only knows what it was built with; a character released in 2025 is going to be a miss. And the artist output always gets the @ prefix, which is right for booru-style prompt blocks but will look odd if you're feeding it to a model that doesn't use that convention. If the database file ever goes missing (an overzealous cleanup), the node fails with a SQLite "no such table" error - you'll know immediately.

For the tag-discovery problem in general, the community answer is tools like AnimaDex (which answers "does this model even know the character?" against live generations). This node is the narrower, faster version: you already know what you want, it just stops you from typo'ing the trigger.