Working with pictures
4 min read
This is the detail behind Work with pictures, the step on the getting-started path. That step teaches the routes - dragging a picture onto the prompt bar, pasting one in the browser, sending a photo from your phone, and finding the picture an agent made. This page is what it sends you here for, and none of it is worth reading until you have used one of them.
Which file types work where
Three sets, and they nest - each one is the set above it plus one more type. That shape is the whole answer, and it is easier to remember than the lists.
| What recognises it | Types |
|---|---|
| The Screenshots panel at your desk | png, jpg, jpeg, bmp, gif |
| The Expand preview, and the gallery in the browser | those five, plus webp |
| What an upload will accept | those six, plus heic |
The first gap is .webp: the Expand preview will show you one inline and the Screenshots panel beside it will not list that same file at all.
.heic. An upload keeps the extension it was sent, so a phone that photographs in .heic files a .heic onto the machine your session is running on - accepted, saved, path handed to the agent, and listed by neither the panel at your desk nor the gallery in the browser. The file is not lost - it is on that machine and its path was handed over exactly as any other picture's would be, and DevThrottle neither converts it nor knows anything about the format. It is simply not in any of DevThrottle's lists, and whether your agent can open a .heic is its own affair, the same as for any image. Open the folder itself before concluding it never arrived - and if the agent cannot use it, set the phone to photograph in JPEG, which is a setting on the phone rather than anything here.The Screenshots panel, button by button
The panel lists the newest fifty matching files in the folder it watches, newest first, each with the time it was written. Refresh re-reads the folder and Clear All empties it; under each thumbnail:
- View opens the picture in the app.
- Copy puts the image itself on the clipboard on Windows - not its path. That is what you want when the picture is going into an issue or a document rather than to an agent.
- Issue does the same copy and then opens GitHub's new-issue form for the selected session's repository, so the picture only has to be pasted in.
- Del deletes that file from disk.
Dragging a thumbnail hands over the file's path as text, which is why it lands in the prompt bar exactly as dragging the file from a file manager does.
.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .bmp and .gif in that folder - so anything of another type, a .webp or a .heic among them, survives a Clear All that looks like it emptied the folder. Once the panel points at your own screenshots folder, that is your own pictures going.Which folder the panel watches
A setting, under Settings - Directories, and until it has been given one there is no operating-system default underneath it. With the setting empty, the folder resolves to one the Director keeps inside its own data folder - which is also where every picture uploaded from a browser or a phone is filed, and is why uploads appear in the panel while your own screenshots do not.
Detect fills in the folder this operating system saves screenshots to, Browse lets you choose one, and Save re-points the panel immediately with no restart. The setup wizard writes the same setting, so on some machines it is already pointed somewhere - the box on that settings page is the only place that tells you where.
Several at once
Only one surface takes more than one picture at a time, and none of them says so. The browser is the one that does: its Attach opens a multiple-selection picker, and every image you choose is uploaded and its path inserted alongside the others.
At your desk a drag takes the first file only - drag five and four are silently ignored. On a phone, Attach picks one at a time, so five pictures is five rounds of Attach. If you have a set to send, send it from the browser.
Where DevThrottle's job ends
Every route ends at the same boundary, and it is the same boundary for all nine kinds of coding agent the Director can run - Claude Code, pi, Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, a raw command line, Cursor, Grok and Copilot. None of them is handed a picture by any other means: the path goes into the prompt, the prompt reaches the agent through one shared path in DevThrottle, and no agent gets image handling of its own on the way.
Where the rest of it lives
The prompt bar and its controls are on Starting and steering agents; the browser's message box on the Cockpit session view; the phone composer on sessions on your phone; and the screenshots folder setting on Director settings. For why the box you drop a picture onto is not the terminal above it, see The prompt bar is not the terminal.