Find Me A Museum Image Skill — Development skill for Claude Code

find-me-a-museum-image

A Claude Code skill that finds real, public-domain artwork for your project — no AI-generated images, no stock sites, no leaving the CLI.

The world's great museums have released hundreds of thousands of high-res artwork scans as CC0/public domain. This skill searches their open-access APIs, previews candidates as thumbnails (which Claude can actually look at and judge), and downloads the full-resolution scan into your project with an attribution sidecar.

Inspired by [Eric Li](https://github.com/erictli)'s [post](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erictli_if-youre-working-on-a-project-and-want-visuals-share-7486074981190135808-uKNs) on using museum open-access collections instead of AI-generated visuals — this skill turns his manual "search museum name + open access" workflow into a single CLI step.

Collections

Museum	Slug	Key needed
Art Institute of Chicago	artic	no
The Metropolitan Museum of Art	met	no
The Cleveland Museum of Art	cleveland	no
SMK — Statens Museum for Kunst	smk	no
Rijksmuseum	rijks	no
The J. Paul Getty Museum	getty	no
Smithsonian Open Access	smithsonian	free — SMITHSONIAN_API_KEY

(National Gallery of Art isn't searchable live — its site is bot-walled — but `references/apis.md` documents its open IIIF image server and CC0 data dumps.)

Install

Via [skills.sh](https://skills.sh) — works for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and a dozen other agents:

npx skills add stevysmith/find-me-a-museum-image-skill

Or manually, as a personal Claude Code skill (available in every project):

git clone https://github.com/stevysmith/find-me-a-museum-image-skill.git
cd find-me-a-museum-image-skill
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && ln -s "$(pwd)" ~/.claude/skills/find-me-a-museum-image

Or per-project:

mkdir -p .claude/skills && ln -s /path/to/find-me-a-museum-image-skill .claude/skills/find-me-a-museum-image

Us