Illustration Finder for Obsidian

Search and insert royalty-free illustrations directly into your Obsidian notes, powered by Claude AI.

Features

• Smart search: Describe what you want — Claude analyzes your intent and builds optimized queries for each source
• AI auto-fill: Click the sparkle button to let Claude suggest an illustration based on your current note content
• Multiple sources: Metropolitan Museum (492K+ artworks), Unsplash (modern photos)
• Auto-insert: The selected image is downloaded to your vault and inserted at cursor position with attribution

Installation

Via Community Plugins (recommended)

1. Open Obsidian
2. Go to Settings → Community plugins → Browse
3. Search for "Illustration Finder"
4. Click Install, then Enable

Manual installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release
2. Create a folder illustration-finder in your .obsidian/plugins/ directory
3. Copy the three files into it
4. Restart Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins

Configuration

Anthropic API key (required)

Used by Claude to analyze your search intent and auto-fill from note content.

1. Create an account on console.anthropic.com
2. Generate an API key
3. In Obsidian: Settings → Illustration Finder → paste your key

Without this key, the plugin still works but searches use your raw text as-is (no intent analysis).

Unsplash API key (optional)

Required only if you want to search Unsplash photos.

1. Create an account on unsplash.com/developers
2. Create an application
3. Copy your Access Key
4. In Obsidian: Settings → Illustration Finder → paste the key

Note: 50 requests/hour on the demo mode.

Other settings

• Illustrations folder: Where downloaded images are saved (default: Assets/Illustrations)
• Default result count: Number of results per source (1–20, default: 5)
• Auto resize / Max width: Resize images on download (default: 1920px)
• Include attribution: Add source/license text below inserted images
• Cache results: Cache search results for faster repeat searches

Usage

1. Place your cursor where you want the image
2. Open the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P)
3. Run "Illustration Finder: Search for an illustration"
4. Describe what you're looking for — or click the sparkle button to auto-fill from your note
5. Optionally add context (e.g. "blog post about neuroscience")
6. Select which sources to search (Met Museum, Unsplash)
7. Pick an image from the results — it gets downloaded and inserted automatically

You can assign a custom hotkey in Settings → Hotkeys → search for "Illustration Finder".

How Claude helps

When an Anthropic API key is configured, Claude:

• Analyzes your intent to determine the type of illustration (historical, modern, scientific, etc.)
• Picks the best sources based on context
• Formulates optimized search queries per source in English
• Suggests Met Museum department filters and date ranges for more relevant results

Available sources

Source	Type	License
Metropolitan Museum	Classical art, antiquities, 492K+ works	CC0 (public domain)
Unsplash	Modern photos	Unsplash License

Network usage

This plugin makes network requests to the following external services:

• Anthropic API (api.anthropic.com) — AI intent analysis and note-based suggestions. Requires a user-provided API key. Your search query and (optionally) note content are sent to generate optimized search terms. No data is stored by the plugin beyond the current session.
• Metropolitan Museum API (collectionapi.metmuseum.org) — Public API, no authentication required. Search queries and image downloads.
• Unsplash API (api.unsplash.com) — Photo search. Requires a user-provided API key. Unsplash images are hotlinked (not downloaded) per Unsplash guidelines.

This plugin does not collect telemetry or send any data to the plugin author.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

1. Fork the project
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b feature/improvement)
3. npm install && npm test && npm run build
4. Commit and open a Pull Request

License

MIT — see LICENSE

Acknowledgements

• Metropolitan Museum for their open access collection
• Unsplash for their photo library
• Anthropic for the Claude API

Support

• Bugs: GitHub Issues
• Questions: Discussions