apple-photos

apple-photos is a skill for Claude Code from sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp. It costs 158 tokens per session (3,659 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A macOS skill for searching, viewing, organizing, and exporting photos from the Apple Photos library.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to locate photos, inspect selections, export files, and—when explicitly enabled—create albums or update photo metadata.
Why use it?
It makes it easier to find photos using details such as dates, albums, people, places, labels, or text while keeping the library read-only by default.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: reads .claude/ paths.

Part of the apple-photos plugin — 1 skill, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it to locate photos, inspect selections, export files, and—when explicitly enabled—create albums or update photo metadata.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp --skill apple-photos
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install apple-photos, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 1 MCP server.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for apple-photos

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apple-photos

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp/apple-photos.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 158 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,659 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 3 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Rogue Agent · line 177
    Skill modifies its own code, configuration, or behavior at runtime. Self-modification enables an agent to escalate privileges, disable safety constraints, or install persistent backdoors.
    Fix: Prevent the skill from modifying its own code, SKILL.md, or configuration files. Treat skill files as read-only at runtime.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 132
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Excessive Agency · line 165
    Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.
    Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00158 $0.03659
Opus 5 $0.00079 $0.01829
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00732
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00366

Measured 12d ago against content hash a26bd31b9334, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apple-photos scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.antigravity-plugin/skills/apple-photos/SKILL.md · 203 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 203 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apple Photos Skill

This skill enables you to query, organize, and export photos from the macOS Apple Photos library using natural language. It is backed by the osxphotos Python library and operates read-only by default — no modifications are made to the library itself, but exports write files to disk.

Write tools exist but are gated: create-album, add-to-album, remove-from-album, set-photo-metadata, set-keywords, set-photo-date, and import-photos only work when the user has set APPLE_PHOTOS_MCP_ENABLE_WRITES=1 (in the server env or in ~/Library/Application Support/apple-photos-mcp/config.json, then restarted the server). Check doctor first when a task needs writes — its writes check reports the gate state; a gated call returns the opt-in recipe to relay to the user. Even with writes enabled, no tool can delete photos (quarantine into an album; the user deletes in Photos.app).

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when the user:

  • Wants to find photos by date, import date ("what did I import this week?"), album, keyword, person, ML label, place, GPS radius ("near the cabin"), year, file size, media type (screenshots, selfies, panoramas, bursts, …), aesthetic score ("the good ones"), OCR-detected text ("photos of receipts"), or favorite/hidden flags
  • Wants to SEE a photo ("show me…", "which one is better?") — get-thumbnail returns viewable images inline
  • Asks about duplicate photos in their library
  • Asks for stats about their library (counts of photos, albums, etc.)
  • Wants to list albums, folders, keywords, or detected persons
  • Needs full metadata for one photo or a batch (dimensions, location, EXIF camera data, type flags)
  • Wants to export photos (originals, edited versions, raw, or live-photo videos) to a directory
  • Says "these photos" about a selection in the Photos.app window — get-selected-photos bridges the GUI selection to UUIDs
  • Wants to organize photos — create albums, file photos into albums, tag with keywords, set titles/descriptions/favorites (write tools; gated — see above)
  • Wants to fix wrong photo dates (trailcam/scanner imports, mis-set camera clocks) — set-photo-date, dry-run first (write tool; gated)
  • Wants to import image/video files into the library — import-photos (write tool; gated; cannot be undone programmatically)
  • Mentions Apple Photos, Photos.app, "my photos", "my photo library"

Read the full file on GitHub · 203 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 203 lines · 158 tokens per session scan A a26bd31b9334

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apple-photos is a skill published in the GitHub repository sweetrb/apple-photos-mcp (20 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 158 tokens to every session and 3,659 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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