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

Claude's vision capabilities allow it to analyse and reason about images, PDFs, and screenshots alongside text. This makes it useful for document analysis, UI debugging, chart interpretation, and more.

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?"}
        ]
    }]
)

PDFs are also supported — they are converted to images internally and each page counts against the image limit. For documents, Claude can read text, interpret charts, and understand layout.

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