Your agent can answer questions from documents and spreadsheets, but many teams also keep critical information in pictures: product photos, screenshots, diagrams, scanned receipts, or whiteboard captures. Previously, datasources rejected image files. Now you can add images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP) to a datasource so your agent can see them as pictures when answering questions.
You might need images in a datasource when:
Your product catalog lives partly in photos your agent should describe or compare
Your team stores architecture diagrams or screenshots the agent should reference
You want receipts or scanned forms visible to the agent alongside your documents
This guide shows you how to add image files to a datasource, which lets your agent view them as pictures in its answers.
Before you begin
Your company must have images-for-datasources enabled (ask your admin if you do not see image formats listed)
Supported formats are PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP; images over 5 MB are compressed in your browser before upload (animated GIFs are never re-encoded)
Steps
Open your datasource and click Add files to see the supported file formats, which now list image types when the feature is on
Drag images into the upload drop zone or pick them through the file picker, which accepts image files alongside documents
Wait for any "Compressing..." indicator to finish, since the datasource cannot be saved while an image is still compressing
Save the datasource and confirm each image row shows an image icon with "Processed" status
Common questions
Are images searched like documents?
No. Images are stored and shown to the AI as pictures; they are not searched. Text documents use search, images use vision.
What happens to files picked from Google Drive or other connectors?
Those are downloaded server-side and are not browser-compressed, so very large images may be rejected instead of shrunk.
What's next?
After adding images, ask your agent questions that reference them. To learn more about datasource types and configuration, see Datasources in elvex.