What it does
Use this first, before any culling, editing, or exporting: nothing else works on photos that have not been ingested. Give an absolute path to a folder of RAW or JPEG/PNG/TIFF files. Subfolders are included. Re-scanning is safe; already-known files are skipped. Returns counts of discovered, newly ingested, and skipped files.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Required |
|---|---|---|
path |
str |
required |
Asking for it
You do not call this by name. You say what you want, and the agent picks the tool:
Cull the wedding shoot in D:/Shoots/eva_tom, keep the best frames, and tell me what you dropped.
The rest of the library tools
Workflows that use it
- Cull a wedding shoot with AI — AI wedding photo culling
- Find duplicate and near-duplicate photos — find duplicate photos automatically
Where it runs
On your machine. imagic's MCP server is a local process that your AI client starts; the photos never leave your disk and nothing is uploaded. That is true of every tool in the reference, including this one.
To call it you need an MCP client connected to imagic. Setup takes about three minutes for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and ten others.
Give your AI the whole pipeline
scan_directory is one of 18 tools in imagic Max. The free 7-day trial includes all of them.