18+ only. This guide discusses adult content and is intended for adult audiences.
You find the perfect character search, hit enter, and half the results are silent thumbnails pretending to be videos — or the opposite: you want a quick loop and every result is a static image. The fix is a family of meta tags that describe the file format of a post rather than its content.
The format tags
animated— any post with movement, whether it's a full video, a gif or an animated PNG. This is the master switch for motion.video— proper video files (mp4/webm), usually longer and with sound.gif— gif loops. Older format, lower quality, but everywhere.sound— the post has audio. Only meaningful combined with animated/video.
Only videos, please
Include +animated to keep only posts with motion. If you specifically want full
videos with audio, stack the tags: +animated;+sound or go straight for +video:
+samus_aran;+animated— animated posts of Samus. Try it+animated;+sound, sorted by score — the community's best sounding posts. Try it
Only still images
Exclude -animated and every gif, loop and video vanishes. This is the single most
useful exclude for people who just want to flip through images:
+harry_potter;-animated— Harry Potter stills only. Try it
Combine with score sorting so the stills you flip through are the good ones.
Format filtering plays well with everything
Because these are ordinary tags, they compose with every other tool: excludes, blacklists,
optional modifiers and score filters. Save your favourite format combo as a supertag — for example a
"stills only" preset with -animated — and apply it to any search with one click.
More on how these fit together: the search syntax guide covers all operators, and the tag types guide explains where meta tags sit in the taxonomy.