Shilpi Image Kit
Generating an image with AI takes a minute or more per picture. A landing page needs a dozen. Shilpi Image Kit fills those slots from the free stock libraries instead, in about a second each. One call to auto_image searches Pexels, Pixabay, Openverse and Wikimedia Commons together, ranks the results
Generating an image with AI takes a minute or more per picture. A landing page needs a dozen. Shilpi Image Kit fills those slots from the free stock libraries instead, in about a second each.
One call to auto_image searches Pexels, Pixabay, Openverse and Wikimedia Commons together, ranks the results against the slot the image has to fill, downloads the winner, resizes it, converts it to WebP, sets the alt text and returns a URL.
Ranking that knows about the slot. Aspect ratio, minimum width and the site’s brand colour all feed the score, so a 16:9 hero gets a wide photograph in the right palette rather than whatever matched the keyword first.
Ranking that knows about the licence. A CC0 photograph outranks one that requires a credit, which outranks one that adds share-alike terms. What lands on a client site is the picture with the fewest obligations attached to it.
One round trip. All four sources are queried together, not one after another, and results are cached for 24 hours.
No duplicates. The same source URL always resolves to the same attachment, so rebuilding a page does not fill the library with copies.
Credits kept. The photographer, the source and the licence are stored on every attachment, shown in a Credit column in the media library and available through the [shilpi_image_credits] shortcode.
Sources
- Pexels and Pixabay need a free API key. Both allow, and Pixabay requires, copying the file to your own server.
- The WordPress Photo Directory is WordPress.org’s own community photo library. No key, and everything in it is CC0, so no attribution is required.
- Openverse , WordPress.org’s own media search, works with no key at all.
- Wikimedia Commons works with no key and covers real places, food, plants and local life far better than the curated libraries.
Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Envato Elements and Canva are deliberately not supported: their terms do not allow a plugin to license and redistribute their images on your behalf.
Using it by hand
Wherever WordPress opens “Choose an image”, a Free stock photos tab sits beside “Upload files” and “Media Library”. Search, pick, and the photograph is downloaded, resized, credited and selected, without leaving the dialog.
REST API
For integrations, authenticated WordPress REST endpoints are available at /wp-json/shilpi-image-kit/v1/ . They support searching free images and importing a selected result into the Media Library.
