<p>Subscriptions are a way of telling the client to regularly check a particular web search. Any new files will be downloaded and imported, and their tags optionally parsed.</p>
<p>You can set up a subscription for any of the gallery websites in the normal <i>new page->download->gallery</i> menu.</p>
<p>Here's the dialog, which is under <i>services->manage subscriptions</i>:</p>
<p>Here I have one subscription for Deviant Art, for the artist ChaoyuanXu. The client is set to check this artist for new files every seven days. It will parse <i>creator</i> and <i>title</i> tags and pend them to the tag repository called 'public tag repo'.</p>
<p>This works very like hydrus repository synchronisation, in the background, reporting its progress in the middle of the status bar at the bottom of the main window, like so:</p>
<p>To initialise a subscription, the client will parse every single currently existing gallery and image page for that particular search. This is fine for the example above, which had 4 gallery pages and 73 image pages, but the search "short hair" on safebooru has about 6,400 gallery pages encompassing >250,000 results! Trying a search like that will take a tremendous amount of time for you and cause a non-trivial CPU and data hit to their server.</p>
<p><i>Remember: If you are going to scrape anything from a site, be polite about it!</i></p>
<p>So, I advise you start with artist searches to begin with. These usually top out at about 1,000 files, and hence don't take all that long. Once you are more confident, try doing multiple-tag queries. I suggest you leave simple single-tag queries for the manual download page, where you can hit 'that's enough' after ten or twenty pages.</p>
<p>If you <i>do</i> put in a huge search, and the 'found x new files for subscription y' message is climbing terrifyingly higher and higher with no end in sight, you can pause the subscriptions daemon with <i>services->pause->subscriptions synchronisation</i>.</p>