Connect Pixabay to ChatGPT via MCP: Photos and Videos

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

Pixabay + ChatGPT

Search over 4 million royalty-free stock photos, illustrations, vector graphics, and videos via the Pixabay API.

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:

PIXABAY_API_KEY

Step 1 — Get credentials

Setting up takes a few minutes. You need a free Pixabay account.

1. Create a free account at https://pixabay.com if you do not have one.
2. While signed in, open https://pixabay.com/api/docs/ and find your API key in the green box under Search Images. It is your numeric user id, a hyphen and a hex token, e.g. 12345678-abcdef0123456789abcdef012.
3. Paste it into PIXABAY_API_KEY. The connector sends it as the key query parameter on every request.
4. Install the connector and run pixabay_search_images with a keyword such as nature.

What it finds: pixabay_search_images searches photos, illustrations and vector graphics by keyword, language, image type, orientation, category, minimum size, colors, Editor's Choice and SafeSearch, or fetches one image by id. Each result has a preview (150px), a web-size (640px) and a large (up to 1280px) image URL, plus size, views, downloads, likes, tags and the artist. pixabay_search_videos searches video clips by keyword, video type, category, minimum size, Editor's Choice and SafeSearch, and returns direct MP4 links in large, medium, small and tiny sizes.

Licence: content on Pixabay is released under the Pixabay Content License: free for commercial and non-commercial use, with no attribution required.

Limits: 3 to 200 results per page (default 20), and at most 500 results per search. Each API key gets 100 requests per minute and 5,000 per hour; above that Pixabay answers 429. Higher limits can be requested from Pixabay support.

Common errors: 401 means Pixabay rejected the key: copy it again from the API docs page while signed in. 429 means the rate limit was reached: wait before trying again.

The connector is read-only.

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 ChatGPT

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.

ChatGPT adds MCP servers as plugins on its Plugins page, on the web and on paid plans. Developer mode is no longer needed. In a Business workspace only admins and owners can add one; in Enterprise and Edu an admin can grant the Create plugins with MCPs permission.

1. Go to chatgpt.com/plugins, click Add, then Add custom MCP server.
2. Enter a name, e.g. Name: Pixabay.
3. Under Connection, enter the Server URL https://cloud.anythingmcp.com/mcp/YOUR_SERVER_ID and keep Authentication on OAuth.
4. Select I understand and want to continue, then Create as a plugin. When ChatGPT asks, sign in to AnythingMCP and allow access.
5. Install the new plugin from your personal plugins, then type @ in a chat and pick it.

Available tools

FAQ

Does the free ChatGPT plan work with custom MCP servers? OpenAI documents custom MCP servers for paid plans only; the Free plan is not on its list.

Next steps

• Connector landing page
• Connect to Claude