You don’t need an API key to do a simple search, but I don’t see the point in “using the API” to do a simple search.
Perhaps I misunderstood the issue. It sounded like an issue that wouldn’t have happened if download remote images to local had been on, and it’s on by default. But it’s also likely that it got turned off for some beaurocratic reason that the admin did that. I think it’s going to be unnecessarily hard to solve your problem without the data explorer plugin or access to Rails.
Dude! You rock!