Notice: Much of this information has been obsolete by Pixiv’s 2010 site re-design. For my more recent tutorial on modifying Pixiv site preferences, go here.
Once again, I’m here to talk to you about using Pixiv. This time it’ll be how to change your site preferences and how to add images to your bookmarks.
Site preferences is an important section because it’s where you need to go if you want to change your email address or your password. This is also where you can enable or disable email notifications, as well enabling adult content viewing and various privacy settings. Make sure you’re logged into Pixiv and let’s get going!
Changing Your Site Preferences
Step 1. On the site navigation bar, the button on the far right will take you to your “Edit Preferences” page. Make sure you’re at the homepage, because on artists’ pages, the navigation bar is different. The URL to the page you’re headed to is http://www.pixiv.net/edit.php.
Step 2a. Here’s where you fill in all of the meaty details! The first two columns will show your Pixiv username and your current registered email address. If you want to change your email, type that into the 3rd text field. Take note that if you have autocomplete enabled in your browser, it may insert your username into the “mail address” change field and can mess up the submission process. If that happens, just delete your username from that field before submitting!
Step 2b. Every Pixiv user (including you!) has their own little bulletin board. It’s a bit like a shoutbox or the profile comment page on DeviantArt. You can choose to make it private or only viewable by certain people. If you want to leave it public, leave the setting alone, as it is that way by default.
Step 2c. Browsing Restrictions are, I’m sure, what you’ve been looking for. This is where you choose to enable or disable adult content. There are two types of mature content. One is R-18 (explicit sexual content) and the other is R-18G (explicit guro content.) In case you don’t know, guro stands for “grotesque”, and implies that the image is explicitly violent or gruesome. In the capture I’ve posted, I have R-18 content enabled and R-18G content disabled. By default, both of these options are turned off, so if you don’t want to see any explicit content, you have nothing to worry about and can skip this section. Select the button on the left to enable an option or the button on the right to disable it.
Step 2d. Next is email notifications for messages and rankings. You can turn them off with the right button if you’d like, but if you’re not an active artist on Pixiv, you’re probably never going to receive any notification emails anyway.
Step 2e. The very last section is for blocking specific users from accessing your Pixiv profile/images/bulletin board, etc. It’s essentially “banning” another user from interacting with you or your Pixiv site. Hopefully you won’t ever need to use this, but it is there just in case. In order to add a user to the block list, you have to insert their member number into one of the “ID” fields. Every Pixiv user has a unique member ID# and you can find it at the end of the URL to their profile, or on a small image on the left column of their profile, which is underneath their profile picture.
Step 3. Once you’re all done with that, click the submit button. Now you can get back to browsing ,with the added bonus of seeing the dirty stuff! (But only if you want to!)
Bookmarking Your Favorite Images
No doubt you’ve already found hundreds of images you love on Pixiv and you’d like to add them to your favorites! Pixiv has a really cool bookmarking system based on using tags, so here is how to use it.
Step 1. Above I have a typical illustration page. Every image on Pixiv has tags displayed right above it. These tags make it easy to search. This picture is tagged “Copyright” (which means it is a fanart) and “Spice and Wolf” (the name of the series the characters in the picture are from). There’s also a row of stars on the top right. You can click on the stars to give the picture a rating if you’d like to. Now, this picture is soooo cute, I want to add it to my bookmarks, so I click the “Bookmark this Illustration” link in the box that sits on the top right of the image.
Step 2. When you choose to bookmark an image, you’ll get a page that allows you to add details about the bookmark. You don’t technically have to do any of this, so if you don’t want to be bothered, just hit the submit button! Personally, I like to tag my bookmarks to make browsing them easier. You’ll be glad you did it when you have upwards of 500 images bookmarked, believe me!
Step 2a. You can choose if you want to make this bookmark public, viewable only by certain folks or viewable only by you. It may seem silly now, but when you start bookmarking the dirty pictures, you’ll know why you have the option!
Step 2b. There’s a text field where you can type in tags manually (separated by spaces) or if you choose to select pre-written tags they will show up in that box automatically. The top tag list is only the tags that the artist has given the image. The big list of tags at the bottom shows tags you’ve used in the past and how many time each tag has been used. I opted to use two of my previously used tags, “Horo” and “Cute”. Gosh, I’ve sure bookmarked a lot of Horo images. She’s just so adorable!
Step 3. You can write a comment about the picture here if you want to. The artist will likely be very glad you did!
Step 4. Hit the submit button!
Huzzah! Your image is bookmarked now. You have a few extra options now.
There’s a link to view the bookmark details, which will show you all of the people who have bookmarked that image in addition to you. It’ll also show you what tags each person used on the image, and you can un-bookmark the image there as well.
Alternatively, you can return to the artist’s gallery summary (that’s the center link) OR return to the newly bookmarked image’s page (the link on the right).
What’s this about Twitter in the top right? It’s a handy dandy way to Tweet that you just bookmarked this sa-weet illustration on Pixiv! Cool!
Now look what happens when you click on that Pixiv link! It takes you to Twitter and inserts a Tweet right into the text box for you. Man, that really works up a sweat! It’ll say (in Japanese) “I bookmarked [pixiv] xxxx on Pixiv” (“xxxx” being the name of the image!) followed by a shortened link straight to the image page. If you want to you can replace it with English; I just leave it as is. Make sure you keep that #pixivtweet hashtag so the Twitter world can see that you’re Tweeting about the great and wonderful Pixiv!
(Oh yeah, in case you were wondering; you can access your bookmarks anytime from the 3rd link on the navigation bar from your homepage. The URL will be http://www.pixiv.net/bookmark.php.)
That’s all for today! If you have a specific question about the pages I reviewed, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer it for you if I can. My Japanese is not fantastic, but Pixiv really is a very simple site to browse and enjoy. Have fun!
Plastic Pleasures 
I hope I don’t offend you by asking a couple questions?
Well, I followed someone elses intructions to sign up and bookmark. I didn’t know about tagging your own bookmarks, is it possible to add personal tags after you’ve already bookmarked it? And can you edit/change/delete tags you’ve already used?
Thanks either way, the guide you’ve made has been really helpful.
Yes indeed, you can edit bookmarks to add or remove tags at any time. In order to do so, go to the selected image’s page. Remember the link you clicked on to bookmark the image originally? That link now says that the image is bookmarked and the link directly to its right will send you to a page that looks just like the one you were sent to when you first bookmarked it. That’s where you can add and remove your tags.
Thank you so very much! It’s such a relief to now be able to manage my bookmarks so easily. I look forward to any new guides you release.
Hi, I was wondering: how I erase a Bookmarked image?
1. Go to your Bookmark page, which is located at http://www.pixiv.net/bookmark.php when you are logged in.
2. You will notice each image has a checkbox underneath of it. Check off the image(s) you would like to remove from your bookmarks and scroll down.
3. There is a line with a search box; entering a tag name in that box will check off all images with that particular tag. Underneath of that line, there’s two buttons. Clicking the first one will make checked images private (only you can see them) and clicking the second one will delete checked images.
I hope this helps. If it doesn’t, I will take some screenshots for you. :)
Thank you… ^^
About favorite and following bookmark privately:
I followed a artist “privately” by mistake but i want to follow him publicly is there a way to change that?
Go to this page, which will show all of the users you watch privately. Check off the box of the user you want to make public and click on the first button on the bottom. Then it should be on your public watch list.
Thanks so much for this!
I’ve gots a questions, though.
Whenever I try to change my settings, I get a message that(when I plug it into Google Translate) says that there was an error and that, if it persists, to restart my browser. It persisted and I restarted my browser. It didn’t fix anything. I then restarted my computer, just to be sure, and it still gave me the error. Do you have any experience with this issue?
Thanks!
Hello. I haven’t experienced the problem you’ve mentioned. Did you make sure your browser isn’t inserting your username into the email address field with autocomplete? That’s the only thing I can think of that will definitely result in an error when trying to edit your settings, unless it happens to be some kind of browser issue.
Hi! Back again. Okay now the problem I’m having is this;
You know that page that shows up when you confirm bookmarked images? And how beneath the info similar images are loaded… well mine for no reason that I can find suddenly stoped loading them… I mean it doesn’t even show the loading bar, and this is the main way I find new pics that I like. So I just really can not fiqure out why it stoped and was hoping you might know.
If in fact you don’t know what I’m talking about I’ll try and send some screenshots. Thanks for any help.
Hey, I just read this, and it seems to help a lot…but I’m currently trying to edit my settings preferences, and it seems that both the buttons for R-18 and R-18G are greyed out and can’t be selected. What can I do so that I can change this?
The only reason I can think of that they would be greyed out would be that you aren’t actually 18. Forgive me if this is wrong. Since you input your birth year when registering, it’s possible that they enforce age restrictions. If this is not the case, I will look into it further.
ive tried to look for this, and i have no ideawhere the first step is, maybe you can do an update
Pixiv re-designed their entire site recently, so it comes as no surprise to me that the interfaces have changed. I’ll do what I can do create a new entry with this information.
How do I remove a favorite? Have already marked the art, I tried all the buttons and it still there!
On your bookmarks page, notice there are little checkboxes over each image; if you check off the ones you don’t want anymore, there is a “remove selected” button at the bottom of the page. You can batch add tags this way too!
Ah, thank you.
I was using the Japanese version, nor had he noticed that there was an option to change the language to English.