Connect Immich to Cursor via MCP: Albums and Photos

💡 No install? Use cloud.anythingmcp.com directly. Sign in, click Connectors → Immich, paste your credentials, mint an MCP API key — done. No Docker, no git clone, no local server.

Immich + Cursor

Let your AI read your Immich photo library: how many photos and videos you have, your albums and who they are shared with, the date, place, camera and people of a photo, the people Immich recognised and how many pictures were taken each month. Read-only: it never uploads, edits or deletes anything. Works with self-hosted Immich 3.0 or newer.

Prerequisites

See the full setup instructions baked into the connector (visible in the in-app store when you select the connector). The required environment variables for this connector are:

IMMICH_URL, IMMICH_API_KEY

Step 1 — Get credentials

Setting up takes about 3 minutes. You need Immich 3.0 or newer and an API key from the user whose library the AI should read. No admin account is needed.

1. Set IMMICH_URL to the address you open Immich at, without /api and without a trailing slash, for example https://photos.example.com or http://192.168.1.10:2283 (the default port is 2283).
2. Log in to Immich as that user, open Account Settings → API Keys → New API Key and grant only user.read, asset.read, asset.statistics, album.read and person.read. Copy the key into IMMICH_API_KEY; Immich shows it only once. It is sent in the x-api-key header.
3. Install the connector and run immich_get_my_user: it shows the user behind the key and its storage quota and usage.

Where Immich runs: on self-hosted AnythingMCP, Immich usually lives on a home server or NAS (http://192.168.x.x:2283). The outbound SSRF guard blocks private and local addresses by default, so an administrator must allow the host through SSRF_ALLOWED_HOSTS or the allowlist in the admin settings. AnythingMCP Cloud can only reach an Immich server exposed on the public internet over HTTPS, for example behind a reverse proxy. A private IP or a local hostname is refused, and the allowlist cannot be changed on Cloud.

What it reads: photo and video counts with immich_get_asset_statistics (without filters it counts every asset not in the trash, archived ones included; visibility=timeline matches the main timeline); albums and who they are shared with (immich_list_albums, immich_get_album); one photo or video with dates, camera, lens, exposure, GPS, city, country, people and tags (immich_get_asset); recognised people by name (immich_search_people); places by name with coordinates (immich_search_places); and counts per month by person, album, tag or favourites (immich_get_timeline_buckets). All ids are UUIDs.

Privacy: an Immich key sees only the library of the user who created it, plus albums shared with that user, and that means their photos, faces and locations. Assign this connector only to MCP servers whose users may see this library. Server file paths, checksums, thumbhashes, OAuth ids and license keys are removed from the answers.

Common errors: 401 means the key is wrong or was deleted; 401 "Elevated permission is required" means the locked folder, which an API key cannot read. 403 "Missing required permission" means the key lacks one of the five permissions. 400 "Not found or no ... access" means there is no asset or album with that id in this library (Immich answers 400, not 404). 400 "Validation failed" means an id is not a UUID, a value is not allowed, or name is missing on a people or place search. 404 on every call means IMMICH_URL is wrong or ends in /api.

The connector is read-only: it does not upload, edit, favourite, archive, trash or delete assets, change albums, tags or people, download originals, thumbnails or videos, run smart or metadata search, or open the locked folder, shared links, memories, admin endpoints or API key management.

Step 2 — Install the adapter

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HelpCode-ai/anythingmcp/main/docker-compose.quickstart.yml -o docker-compose.yml
printf 'JWT_SECRET=%s\nENCRYPTION_KEY=%s\n' "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" "$(openssl rand -hex 32)" > .env
docker compose up -d

Step 3 — Add the connector in Cursor

Your server URL: in AnythingMCP, open MCP Servers → the server this connector is on, and copy its URL (https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/…). Use it wherever this guide shows YOUR_SERVER_ID.

Cursor reads MCP servers from ~/.cursor/mcp.json. Add this entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "anythingmcp": {
      "url": "https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/YOUR_SERVER_ID",
      "headers": { "X-API-Key": "YOUR_MCP_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

1. Create an MCP API key in AnythingMCP under MCP Servers → your server → API keys, and paste it in place of YOUR_MCP_API_KEY.
2. Save the file and restart Cursor.
3. Open Cursor → Settings → MCP and check that anythingmcp is listed and connected.
4. Start chatting — the agent can now call the Immich tools.

Available tools

FAQ

Does Cursor support custom MCP servers on the free tier? Yes — MCP is available on Hobby, Pro and Business plans.

Next steps

• Connector landing page
• Connect to Claude
• Connect to ChatGPT