What are Claude's multimodal capabilities — how does it process images and documents?

import anthropic, base64

client = anthropic.Anthropic()

# Option 1: URL-based image (Claude fetches from URL)
response = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-opus-4-8",
    max_tokens=1024,
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image",
                "source": {"type": "url", "url": "https://example.com/chart.png"}
            },
            {"type": "text", "text": "Describe this chart."}
        ]
    }]
)

# Option 2: Base64-encoded image
with open("image.jpg", "rb") as f:
    image_data = base64.standard_b64encode(f.read()).decode("utf-8")

response = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-opus-4-8",
    max_tokens=1024,
    messages=[{
        "role": "user",
        "content": [
            {
                "type": "image",
                "source": {"type": "base64", "media_type": "image/jpeg", "data": image_data}
            },
            {"type": "text", "text": "What is in this image?"}
        ]
    }]
)