A local MCP for my photos

I've been trying out a couple of different apps, either with built-in MCP capabilities or ones that I can vibe-code for. But it hasn't been working out, since I've had to tag and classify the photos all over again, despite their promises to do it quickly with the help of AI. So I wondered, why am I not simply using an MCP for my default Apple Photos for Mac app? Obviously, someone must have thought about it. That's how I chanced upon Rob Sweet's Apple Photos MCP made available on GitHub.

The repository is well-documented, offers several tools I wanted to use to query my photos, and, best of all, it will work with the photo library I've curated and tagged extensively for a long time. Installation is a breeze, though you can clone or fork a local copy to your own GitHub account to make it more secure, as I did for my MCP with Monarch Money. After cloning, I asked Claude to do a full code review to detect malware or suspicious elements, and then forked it to customize it with additional tools.

However, this Apple Photos MCP seems to cover everything I can think of doing with my photos. It's primarily a read-only tool, with the option to enable some write tools (to add tags, create and add to albums, etc.). However, be aware that it requires Claude to have Full Disk Access, so I wouldn't enable any write access, even though the delete option is deliberately excluded.

One of the more "fun" and interesting parts was, in fact, during the installation and testing of this server. It worked initially, but after I made some tweaks, it stopped working and wouldn't run any query. That led me down a rabbit hole, and I learned more about disk access permissions and Node than I had set out to. The craziest part was how Claude diagnosed an issue and discovered a bug, mostly in error reporting, and helped me write an issue on the developer's GitHub page. I would have taken eons to understand and convey information about the bug and how it was blocking things at my end.

The developer responded promptly, reinstalled a fixed version of the server, encountered another issue, which he also fixed promptly, and then we got it working. Although the developer is also using Claude to vibe-code the MCP server and it may just have been two Claude agents diagnosing and fixing the MCP code, it was fun to go through the process that otherwise would have been frustrating and plenty of late nights at my end, or even eventually led me to give up on it all.

Now it was ready to run some queries on my >32K photos. More on that in the next post.