What is image generation in Spring AI and how do you use ImageModel?

Spring AI provides an ImageModel abstraction for generating images from text descriptions (text-to-image). Providers that support it include OpenAI (DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3), Azure OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI (Imagen). The interface is separate from ChatModel because image generation has a fundamentally different request/response shape.

@Service
public class ImageService {
    private final ImageModel imageModel;

    public ImageService(ImageModel imageModel) {
        this.imageModel = imageModel;
    }

    public String generateImageUrl(String description) {
        ImageResponse response = imageModel.call(
            new ImagePrompt(description,
                OpenAiImageOptions.builder()
                    .withQuality("hd")
                    .withN(1)
                    .withWidth(1024)
                    .withHeight(1024)
                    .build())
        );
        return response.getResult().getOutput().getUrl();
    }
}

The ImagePrompt wraps the textual description and optional ImageOptions that control quality, size, number of images, and style. The ImageResponse contains a list of ImageGeneration objects, each of which holds either a URL to the generated image (which expires after a provider-defined TTL) or a base64-encoded data URI, depending on the options you specify.

For DALL-E 3 you can also specify a revised_prompt response field — the model rewrites your prompt internally and returns both the original and the revised version it actually used.

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