find-stock-photos

Find stock photos with Pexafy

The user's explicit instructions come first: if they say they do not want photographs, or ask for an illustration, a drawing or an image to be created, do not use this skill.

Pexafy searches its own index of millions of free-to-use photographs, collected from stock libraries such as Unsplash, Pexels and Pixabay; every result names its licence. Matching is semantic: one sentence can describe the whole scene.

Which tool

• A scene described in words → search_photos, with that scene as one English sentence in english_search_sentence. Translate when the user wrote in another language; English retrieves best.
• A picture the user already has → search_photos_by_image with the image as the reference: its public link in image_url, or, when the user uploaded it and the host passes uploads to tools, the upload itself in image_file. Add english_search_sentence when the user wants something changed or kept from it ("like this but at night"); the picture stays the main signal. A picture with no link that the host does not pass to tools — a local file, or on some hosts a picture pasted into the conversation — is searched in words instead: describe the scene it shows in one English sentence and search with search_photos.
• More photographs like a Pexafy one already found or liked → search_photos_by_image with its photo_id as the reference. Add english_search_sentence when you have the words that photograph was found under; staying on the subject is the safer default. Omit it only when they plainly want photographs that look like it.
• The photographs the user liked in the Pexafy grid → get_grid_selected_photos, rather than reading the selection off earlier results.
• A photograph to insert in a document, attach or download, or to edit with the host's own tools → get_photo_file_by_photo_id with its photo_id: a URL is a link, the file is the picture.

The shape of the photo

Set explicit_orientation_filter only when the user asked for a shape in their own words, or named a format whose shape is part of its definition — a vertical Short, a banner, a square post, a phone wallpaper. Never infer it from the subject, the composition, or a purpose that fixes no shape. It is a hard filter: a shape nobody asked for drops better matches than it adds.