Find me a museum image

Search museum open-access APIs for public-domain (CC0) artwork, preview candidates visually, and download a high-resolution image into the user's project with attribution — all from the CLI.

The tool is scripts/museum_image.py inside this skill's directory — the directory containing this SKILL.md. Since your working directory is the user's project, call it by absolute path; <skill-dir> below means this skill's directory. Python 3, stdlib only. Museums that work with no API key: artic (Art Institute of Chicago), met (The Met), cleveland (Cleveland Museum of Art), smk (Statens Museum for Kunst, Denmark), rijks (Rijksmuseum), getty (J. Paul Getty Museum). With a free key in an env var: smithsonian (SMITHSONIAN_API_KEY).

Workflow

1. Turn the request into search terms

Distill what the user actually needs:

• Subject/mood: "calm sea", "sunflowers", "storm", "city at night". Museum search is keyword-based — search concrete nouns and artist names, not vibes. Translate "something serene for a meditation app" into searches like "calm sea", "water lilies", "quiet landscape", or artist names (monet, hammershoi, hiroshige).
• Orientation: a hero/banner wants --orientation landscape; a mobile splash wants portrait.
• Usage context: where in the project will it go? This decides the output path and how picky to be about palette.

Run 2–4 different queries rather than one — museum metadata is sparse, and synonyms surface different works.

2. Search with thumbnails