We discourage using the Parent feature to change posts into child posts. Not only do child posts not count towards the site's pic count, but they can't be found in searches or seen on the "Posts" page. In my opinion, this does more harm than good for most pics.

I'm looking into situations where child posts may be useful (such as the same pic at a different resolution), but for the time being, please refrain from using the Parent feature.

As an alternative, you could always leave a comment with the link or post number of all the related posts.

There are some kinds of sources (such as game CG) where there are several variations of the same pic (girl, girl cumming, girl with sperm on face, etc) where I think the whole bunch should be counted as one pic (since even most pixels are identical), and in this case I believe it is relevant to have the aforementioned restrictions (not counted as several pics but just one, and not polluting search results).

If even one tag is different, I would not make it into a child post.

And this is key. Because you have to remember: child posts can't be searched. If that one tag that's different is what someone is looking for, they won't find the parent post, and thus they won't find the relevant child post.

I'd usually agree that such similar pics deserve to be parent/child, but it just seems a little self-defeating since you can't search them.

What about just tagging the parent as the childs?

That's what we do for doujins, but I don't want to do it for stand-alone images. Besides, I just KNOW that would result in people posting "Why the heck is this tagged ___?" The main point is this: child posts are not designed to hide images that are similar to each other. That's how it works HERE, but on larger boorus, child posts show up in searches just like any other post. Child posts are designed to link similar images to each other. As long as the results you're getting from your search are relevant to your search, there is no "pollution" going on.

I wish our booru handled child posts like the larger boorus. Then, there would be no issues with making similar pics into child posts.