How to import a SillyTavern character card and chat online

What a character card actually is

A character card is a small bundle of text that tells a language model who it is playing: a name, a description of the character, a personality summary, the situation the story starts in, the character's opening message, and a few sample exchanges that demonstrate voice. It usually travels as a PNG portrait with that text hidden inside the image file, or as a plain .json file with the same content.

The PNG trick is the reason cards spread the way they did. A PNG can carry arbitrary text chunks alongside the pixels, so a card is a picture you can post anywhere and a data file at the same time. SillyTavern reads it, Chub serves it, and LoreChat reads it too. The card is the character; the app around it is interchangeable, which is why a card exported from SillyTavern works here without any conversion step.

Where your cards live in SillyTavern

SillyTavern stores every character you have imported or made as a PNG on disk. In recent versions that is the per-user data directory, so a card called Mara Vell sits at data/default-user/characters/Mara Vell.png. Older single-user installs kept the same files in public/characters/. Copy the file out of that folder and you have the card, complete with its lorebook and greetings.

If you would rather not dig through folders, do it from the interface. Open the character panel, select the character, and use the export control; SillyTavern offers a PNG export and a JSON export of the same card. Either file imports here. Pick JSON if you want to read the card in a text editor first, PNG if you also want to keep the portrait.

• Recent SillyTavern: data/default-user/characters/<Name>.png
• Older installs: public/characters/<Name>.png
• From the interface: open the character panel, choose the character, and export as PNG or JSON
• A card you downloaded from Chub and never renamed is already in one of those folders

Importing the card on LoreChat

Importing takes about fifteen seconds. You need a free account because the card is saved to your library, and you accept the Terms and the content policy when you create it. You do not need to install anything and you do not need an API key; the models are provided by the service.

Drag the file onto the drop zone or use the file picker, whichever you prefer. The card is parsed in front of you, and the fields it found are shown before anything is saved, so a card that lost its lorebook somewhere along the way is obvious immediately rather than three hours into a chat.

• Create a free account and sign in
• Open /characters/import
• Drag the .png or .json card onto the drop zone, or click to pick the file
• Check the parsed fields: name, description, greetings, lorebook entries
• Save the card to your library, then start a chat

What gets imported

Everything a modern card carries comes across. The core prompt fields are name, description, personality, scenario, first message and example dialogue. Beyond those, alternate greetings are kept, up to twenty of them, so you can reroll the opening scene rather than the whole character. Creator notes are read from creator_notes, and from the older creatorcomment key that some V1 cards still use. Tags are normalised to lowercase, capped at twenty tags of forty characters each, and used for search and filtering. Creator and character version are preserved as written.

The lorebook, called character_book in the card, is imported whole: its name and description, its scan depth (4 when the card does not say), its token budget (2048 by default), the recursive scanning flag, and every entry with its keys, secondary keys, and its constant, selective and insertion-position settings. Prompt macros survive too, so {{char}} and {{user}} are substituted with the character's name and your persona's name at the moment the prompt is built.

• name, description, personality, scenario, first_mes, mes_example
• alternate_greetings (up to 20)
• creator_notes (also read from creatorcomment), tags, creator, character_version
• character_book: scan_depth, token_budget, recursive_scanning, and every entry

The two errors you might see, and how to fix them

"No character data found in this PNG" means the file is a picture with no card inside it. The usual cause is that the PNG went through an image editor, a resizer, or a messaging app that re-encoded it: those tools rebuild the file from the pixels and quietly drop the text chunk that held the card. A screenshot of a card is a picture of a card, not a card, and has the same problem. The fix is to get an untouched copy — re-export from SillyTavern, or download the original file again — or to export the character as JSON instead, since JSON has nothing to strip.

"Unrecognized card format. Expected Character Card V1, V2, or V3 JSON." means the JSON parsed fine but is not a character card. People hit this with a standalone lorebook export, a chat log, or a settings file. A real card is either an object with spec set to chara_card_v2 or chara_card_v3 and a data block, an object shaped like that even if the spec string is unfamiliar, or a bare V1 object with name at the top level. Anything else is a different kind of file.

Files downloaded from Chub with the Download button are ordinary card PNGs and import without any special handling. If the card imports but the character feels thin, the file is fine and the card is thin: open it in the editor and look at whether the description is doing any work.

After the import

The card lands in your library and is private. Nobody else can see it, and it stays that way until you decide otherwise. From the editor you can rewrite any field, add or trim lorebook entries, add greetings, and export the result again as V2 JSON, V3 JSON, or a PNG with the card embedded, so you are never locked in.

Starting a chat is the point of all this. Replies stream, and each one costs 1 credit; an illustration costs 5, and the free plan gives you 75 credits and two free illustrations a day, resetting at midnight UTC. You can regenerate a reply, continue one that stopped early, and swipe between versions. Set a persona so the character knows who you are, pin messages you want remembered, and leave the story director on if you want the plot to move on its own.

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