Distill MCP Server is the official Model Context Protocol bridge for Distill. Distill is a native macOS app that uses AI (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, or Apple Intelligence) to read file contents and rename files with descriptive, consistent names, for example turning IMG_4521.jpg or Scan_003.pdf into 250401 Invoice Telekom.pdf.
Purpose: to let Claude, Cursor, or other MCP clients automatically rename files on the user's behalf. Example instruction: "Claude, look at the 47 PDFs in ~/Downloads and rename them based on their contents, but show me the suggestions first."
Main capabilities: this MCP server exposes 9 tools. Distill can read PDFs, images (via OCR), Office documents, emails, HTML, RTF, and media files, extract dates, categories, descriptions, senders, and amounts, then build filenames using user-configurable rules. Distill also has folder monitoring capability, automatically renaming files once they are placed in a folder.
Usage: the Distill app must be installed and running; this MCP server is a stdio to HTTP bridge, and the actual file analysis is done in the app. You can get the precompiled DistillMCP binary from Releases, or build it from source. Configuration is done by editing ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json. Distill's token can be found in Distill's Settings → API & MCP. Cursor or other MCP clients are configured the same way, via two environment variables. The bridge reads JSON-RPC 2.0 requests from stdin, forwards them to Distill's local HTTP server at 127.0.0.1:22200/mcp, and writes the responses back to stdout. Errors and trace logs are written to stderr so as not to pollute the JSON-RPC stdout channel.
Use cases: users who need to batch organize download directories, scans,invoices, emails, or media files on macOS, and want to trigger automatic renaming in natural language through MCP clients such as Claude/Cursor.
Limitations and requirements: only macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later is supported; the Distill app must be installed and running; building from source requires Swift 5.9+ (Xcode 15+). The bridge is open source under MIT, while the Distill app is commercial software with a free trial and usage-based pricing (100 free / 100 for 1.99 euros / 400 for 4.99 euros / 1,000 for 8.99 euros).
