Add your own Claude key

Nothing is blocked without this. les Archives starts you on included credits and everything works.

One reason justifies adding a key. Included credits come with a monthly image cap and your own key doesn't. Studio is 500 images a month. Agency is 1,000, pooled across your client workspaces. Two or three jobs at the size we suggest. With your own key there's no cap, and you pay Anthropic directly for what you catalog.

Step 1. Make a key at console.anthropic.com

Sign in, open Settings, then API Keys, then Create Key. Copy it when it's shown, because it's only shown once. It starts with sk-ant-.

The panel in Settings has a link straight to that page.

Step 2. Put billing on that Anthropic account

This is the step people miss. A key with no billing behind it looks valid and fails on the first real request. Add a payment method and put a starting balance on the account.

Step 3. Paste it into Chapter 08

Open SETTINGS, go to Chapter 08 Keys & Cloud, and unfold PERSONAL ANTHROPIC KEY.

A toggle sits at the top of the panel, with a field under it labelled Personal Anthropic key.

Paste into the field. No Save button sits next to it. It saves as you type.

Then turn the toggle on. It reads Using your own key when it's on and Using les Archives credits when it's off.

Going back to credits

Turn the toggle off. The whole mechanism. The label flips back to Using les Archives credits and the field greys out with a line under it reading "Saved but paused · turn the toggle on to use it".

Nothing you already cataloged changes either way.

It also makes cataloging faster, if you own the workspace

On included credits we send three frames per request, because those calls go through our proxy and it has a time limit.

With your own key we go direct and use the batch size set in Chapter 07, The Machinery. The default there's five.

The twenty second pause between batches is the same either way, and it's also in Chapter 07.

Where the key lives

On this Mac, in your local settings, and nowhere else. We never sync it to our servers. Sign in on a second Mac and you paste it again there.

The other key, which isn't this one

Studio and Agency workspaces get a second row in Chapter 08, WORKSPACE ANTHROPIC KEY. A different thing entirely.

It bills everyone working inside a workspace to one key. The owner sets it, and team members can only see that it exists. Unlike the personal key, it has its own Save button, so paste and then press Save.

Your personal key is never used for someone else's workspace, and a workspace key never reaches a member's Mac. That is what the proxy in the middle is for.

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