Thought I should share a few tips and tricks I've picked up for finding accurate romanized usernames for a lot of artists on Pixiv. Please feel free to share your own in this thread!
Pixiv ID
For the purposes of this thread, I'll be referring to the number at the end of a Pixiv artist URL as the Pixiv ID.
In these URLs, the Pixiv ID is 147437.
Tips & Tricks
e621 and Danbooru Artists search
This is the easiest way to find a Pixiv artist's romanized tag if someone has already used one on e6 or Danbooru. I recommend trying this first to ensure consistency. Just search the user's Pixiv ID in the URL field of the e621 Artists page and/or the Danbooru Artists page.
If you get a hit, always double check to make sure you're not getting a partial match. For example, here on e6 you'll often get URLs like 147437fnu4a9983293.jpg, which happens to contain 147437 but is not what we're looking for. You might also get a Pixiv URL like https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1474372, which again contains the right numbers but also one extra. Make sure that one of the URLs linked is actually the correct Pixiv URL for the artist you're searching.
Linked blogs
Look for Twitter, Tumblr, fc2 (Japanese), Plurk (Taiwanese), and other homepage/blog links on the artist's Pixiv page. Those often require an alphanumeric username. If there's more than one, I usually search e6 tags for all of them, and/or pick the most recently updated.
Pixiv user_account name
This one's a little more involved. If you can't come up with a username using the above methods, you can plug a Pixiv ID into the following URL:
https://www.pixiv.net/touch/ajax/user/details?id=
after the ?id= parameter. This will return a JSON file with all of that user's account information (if you're not using Firefox it's much easier to view with a browser extension like JSONView for Chrome). Look for the "user_account" entry and read the value associated with it—these will always be ASCII.
To check if you got it right, try adding that username to the end of https://www.pixiv.me/. For example, using Pixiv ID 147437, I get byakkoseafox, and https://www.pixiv.me/byakkoseafox takes me back to the artist's page correctly.
A common pitfall of this technique
Note that sometimes even this provides unhelpful usernames, often in the following formats:
- A bunch of numbers
- qq followed by a bunch of numbers
- user_abcd1234
The first two seem to be common among Chinese users, while the latter is the format of Pixiv's automatically generated usernames.
Romanizing on your own
With caution, it's possible to do your own romanization even if you don't speak the language. I won't go into too much detail for this, but some helpful resources are:
- Whiteagle.net for kana (JP)
- Jisho.org for kanji (JP)
- Google Translate (duh! my main solution for Chinese)
- topic #22098 for additional help
(Fun fact, if you see the kanji 々, it means "repeat the last kanji before this." So 狐々 would, I believe, be read "kitsune kitsune". Someone correct me on that if I'm wrong!)
Special cases
When the artist's Pixiv account has been deleted
In this case, I usually start with SauceNAO to get the artist's display name and URL. Here you can get the URL in the old format (/member.php?id= as opposed to /en/users/) and look it up on the Wayback Machine or just Google it.
If you can manage to get a Wayback archived copy of the page, try right clicking on one of their artwork images (even if the link is broken!) and copying the image URL. Chances are this will contain their Pixiv user_account name. That's actually the old way a lot of Pixiv usernames were sourced. Using the example of Pixiv ID 961456, we can find:
- A Wayback archived copy of the page from 2013.
- A bunch of illustration images that weren't archived, one of which has this URL
- That url ends with /img/kobanba/32469179_s.jpg—thus we can determine that the artist's Pixiv user_account name was kobanba.
If all of that fails, you can simply try romanizing the display name yourself.
When there's another artist with the same name
There seem to be competing philosophies on e621 about this, but I am personally NOT a fan of appending _(artist) or _(pixiv) to the end of a name as that does not actually help to disambiguate. My preferences are usually to append:
- _([Pixiv user_account name]): e.g. name_(byakkoseafox)
- _(pixiv[Pixiv ID]): e.g. name_(pixiv147437)
Or any other unique identifier that actually points to that artist.
Other
I haven't personally tried it, but Idem's Sourcing Suite exists.(Not currently working with Pixiv)- You can always get someone else to try this by requesting in topic #23835.
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