hellokaton/unsplash-mcp-server

Overview

A Model Context Protocol server for searching Unsplash images. It wraps the Unsplash API and exposes image search operations as callable tools that an MCP-compatible AI assistant can invoke.

Best for

Best for
Developers building AI assistants or tools that need on-demand access to Unsplash's free image library.

Use cases

• Search for free high-quality photos by keyword from a chat interface
• Fetch curated Unsplash images to accompany text or blog content
• Integrate image discovery into automated workflows or AI agents

How to use

Install

git clone https://github.com/hellokaton/unsplash-mcp-server.git && cd unsplash-mcp-server && uv venv && uv pip install .

Tools exposed

• search_photos

Tested with

Cursor, Windsurf, Cline

Example client config

{\n  "mcpServers": {\n    "unsplash": {\n      "command": "uv",\n      "args": ["run", "--with", "fastmcp", "fastmcp", "run", "./server.py"],\n      "env": {\n        "UNSPLASH_ACCESS_KEY": "${YOUR_ACCESS_KEY}"\n      }\n    }\n  }\n}

Notes

A Model Context Protocol server for searching Unsplash images. It wraps the Unsplash API and exposes image search operations as callable tools that an MCP-compatible AI assistant can invoke.

220 stars on GitHub. Last updated 2026-04-23. Licensed MIT.

Use cases

• Search for free high-quality photos by keyword from a chat interface
• Fetch curated Unsplash images to accompany text or blog content
• Integrate image discovery into automated workflows or AI agents

Pros

• Simple drop-in MCP server that works with any compliant host
• Lightweight Python implementation with a focused API surface
• Gives AI assistants direct access to a rich image library

Cons

• Requires an Unsplash API key and respects their rate limits
• Only supports search, no upload or account management features
• Limited to 220 GitHub stars, smaller community for support

Indexed from awesome-mcp-servers-punkpeye and enriched against its public facts.