Use with agents

Lightdrift is agent-native by design: requests are plain JSON, every answer is fully machine-readable, and the rights question — the thing that usually needs a human — is answered inline.

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MCP server

The MCP server exposes the same capabilities as the REST API as tools:

• search — natural-language text search with filters and negative constraints
• find_similar — expand from an asset you already have
• get_asset — full metadata and rights for one asset

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Patterns that work well

• Grounding generation — retrieve a real photo of an obscure subject first, then hand it to your image model as a reference. The generator stops guessing.
• Slide and page builders — ask for the subject and the layout: “room for a headline on the left” becomes a negative-space filter.
• Answering with real images — for anything past the canonical middle (a larva, a rare species, an obscure place), retrieval beats recall.
• Rights-aware pipelines — filter on rights.commercial and carry rights.attribution through to the final artifact automatically.

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Direct REST use

Agents that don’t speak MCP can call the REST API directly — it’s four endpoints, all JSON in and out. Image and multimodal query inputs are on the beta roadmap.