Search Pexels photos and videos with orientation, size, color, and locale filters while tracking the monthly rate limit
domain: api.pexels.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Request an API key at pexels.com/api, which is issued instantly to any Pexels account
Send requests with an 'Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY' header (no Bearer prefix) to GET https://api.pexels.com/v1/search for photos or GET https://api.pexels.com/v1/videos/search for videos
Add optional filters: orientation (landscape/portrait/square), size, color (photos only), and locale (e.g. en-US, ja-JP) alongside the required query parameter
Paginate with page and per_page (max 80 per page), reading the next_page/prev_page URLs in the JSON response
Read X-Ratelimit-Limit, X-Ratelimit-Remaining, and X-Ratelimit-Reset response headers on every successful (2xx) response to track usage against the plan's monthly cap
On a 429 response, back off until the UNIX timestamp in X-Ratelimit-Reset since rate-limit headers are not included on 429 responses themselves
Known gotchas
Default API keys are capped at 200 requests/hour and 20,000 requests/month; exceeding this returns 429 with no rate-limit headers to introspect, so remaining/reset must be tracked from the prior successful response
The legacy https://api.pexels.com/videos/ path (without /v1/) is deprecated; new integrations must use https://api.pexels.com/v1/videos/
Attempting to work around the rate limit (e.g. rotating keys) is explicitly called out as grounds for API access termination
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