Reference

The REST API

No key, no sign-up, no rate limit worth mentioning. CORS is open to every origin, because a free library you can only call from a server is a free library for half the people who want it.

Base URLhttps://quarry.siteko.tech

GET/api/v1/images

Search the library. With no parameters it returns the most downloaded images.

Parameter	Type	Notes
`q`	string	Keywords. Split on spaces and matched against tags and titles. Any word matching is enough to appear; images matching more words rank higher.
`category`	enum	One of SPACE, ART, FOREST, WATER, MOUNTAINS, ARCHITECTURE, TRANSPORT, PEOPLE, SKY, STREET, WORKSPACE, FOOD, ANIMALS, ABSTRACT, TECHNOLOGY, TEXTURE, INTERIOR, NATURE, URBAN. Case-insensitive.
`orientation`	enum	LANDSCAPE, PORTRAIT or SQUARE.
`page`	integer	Defaults to 1.
`per_page`	integer	1–80. Defaults to 24.
`sort`	enum	relevant, newest or popular.

curl "https://quarry.siteko.tech/api/v1/images?q=forest+fog&per_page=2"

{
  "total": 62,
  "page": 1,
  "perPage": 2,
  "pages": 31,
  "images": [
    {
      "id": "jw2adbb",
      "title": "Fog in the forest",
      "author": "Orlova Maria",
      "width": 2300,
      "height": 1533,
      "orientation": "LANDSCAPE",
      "category": "FOREST",
      "tags": ["forest", "fog", "trees", "mist"],
      "color": "#dfe6dc",
      "downloads": 207,
      "urls": {
        "400":  "https://quarry.siteko.tech/i/jw2adbb/400",
        "800":  "https://quarry.siteko.tech/i/jw2adbb/800",
        "1200": "https://quarry.siteko.tech/i/jw2adbb/1200",
        "1600": "https://quarry.siteko.tech/i/jw2adbb/1600",
        "2400": "https://quarry.siteko.tech/i/jw2adbb/2400"
      },
      "sourceUrl": "https://unsplash.com/photos/7FLh300YONc"
    }
  ]
}

GET/api/v1/images/:id

One image, plus eight visually related ones. The related list is ranked by how many tags overlap, falling back to the same category.

curl "https://quarry.siteko.tech/api/v1/images/jw2adbb"

{ "image": { … }, "related": [ … ] }

GET/api/v1/categories

Every category with a live count.

GET/api/v1/tags

The most-used tags. This is the actual vocabulary of the library — the tags were written by hand while looking at each photograph, so searching with them works rather than nearly works.

Parameter	Type	Notes
`limit`	integer	1–200. Defaults to 40.

GET/i/:id/:width

The file. Responds 302 to the CDN rather than proxying the bytes — one link on Reddit should not turn this server into a byte pump. Widths: 400, 800, 1200, 1600, 2400. Anything else is a 400 with the list.

This is also the URL that counts a download. The thumbnails on this site point straight at the CDN instead, because scrolling past an image is not downloading it.

Errors

Every error carries a stable code to branch on and a sentence a person can act on. An unknown value is rejected rather than ignored — a filter that gets silently dropped returns the whole library and looks like it worked.

curl "https://quarry.siteko.tech/api/v1/images?category=sunsets"

{
  "error": {
    "code": "bad_category",
    "message": "Unknown category \"SUNSETS\".",
    "hint": "One of: SPACE, ART, FOREST, WATER, …"
  }
}

Or skip the API

If the caller is a language model, the MCP server is a better fit than this. It wraps these same endpoints and returns text a model can read instead of JSON it has to parse.