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Why this matters

Some of your most useful information never makes it into searchable text: a screenshot of an error, a photo of a whiteboard, a chart embedded as an image, a scanned document. Chief’s goal with images is to make that visual content part of the same knowledge you query everything else against — so a picture you dropped in doesn’t become a dead end. The value is simple: fewer “I know it’s in there somewhere” moments, because image-based files can join the rest of your Project instead of sitting outside it.

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How it actually works

Chief Vision Ingest - adding images via Upload files or Paste content
Image files are recognized as their own type and run through Chief’s ingestion pipeline rather than the document path. As part of that, Chief normalizes images so they’re cleanly readable by the underlying models — for example, re-encoding PNGs that arrive with non-standard metadata (a common quirk of screenshots taken on phones) so nothing trips up downstream processing. Once an image is ingested into a Project, it lives alongside your other files and can be brought into a chat the same way. Images are part of Chief’s Universal Ingestion story — the same capability that takes in PDFs, audio, video, spreadsheets, and transcripts. The intent is that image-based documents stop being invisible and become queryable intelligence with no preprocessing on your side.
ℹ️ Good to Know: Chief reads what’s visible in an image — it can’t recover information that isn’t actually shown there. A blurry photo, a cropped chart, or a screenshot missing the relevant region limits what Chief can work with, the same way it would for a human reader.

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A worked example

A teammate pastes a screenshot of a dashboard into a Project instead of exporting the underlying numbers. Rather than that image being a dead end, Chief ingests it into the Project so it sits alongside your documents and transcripts — and you can bring it into a chat to ask about it instead of re-typing what it shows.

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FAQ

The most common causes are image quality and framing: if the relevant text or chart is small, blurry, or cropped out of frame, Chief has less to work with. Re-uploading a clearer, fuller image usually helps. (Exact depth of in-image text and chart reading — verify with the team before publishing.)
Yes. This article is about Chief taking in image files you provide. Generating new images from a prompt is a separate, beta capability.
Common image formats like PNG are supported as part of Universal Ingestion. (The full list of supported image formats — verify with the team before publishing.)