Tools reference changedtools-reference
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Upstream edited this page at 20 Oct 2026 19:48 UTC, give or take a minute or two: the time comes from Anthropic’s own sitemap rather than from a commit. This site recorded the change at 20 Oct 2026 19:50 UTC.
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500500* **Images**: PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP files are returned as visual content that Claude can see, not as raw bytes. Claude Code resizes and recompresses large images to fit the model's image size limits before sending them, so Claude may see a downscaled version of a large screenshot.
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502502 If Claude misses fine pixel-level detail in a large image, ask it to crop the region you care about, such as with ImageMagick via Bash, and then read the crop.
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504 Read refuses an image file larger than 128 MB with an error that tells Claude to resize the image or export a smaller copy, then read that copy. If Claude stops at the error instead of doing so, see [File is too large to read as an image](/docs/en/errors#file-is-too-large-to-read-as-an-image).
503505* **PDFs**: Claude reads short `.pdf` files whole. For PDFs longer than 10 pages, it reads in ranges with a `pages` parameter, such as `"1-5"`, up to 20 pages at a time. Page-range reads render pages with `pdftoppm` from poppler-utils, so install it with `brew install poppler` on macOS or `apt-get install poppler-utils` on Debian and Ubuntu. On Windows and other platforms, install a poppler build that puts `pdftoppm` on your `PATH`. Without it, a page-range read fails with `pdftoppm is not installed`.
504506* **Jupyter notebooks**: `.ipynb` files return all cells with their outputs, including code, markdown, and visualizations. A notebook whose cells come to more than 256 KB, or more than the [token limit](#large-files), returns an error instead. Claude Code refuses to read a notebook file over 100 MB; the error tells Claude how to read a portion of the notebook instead, such as a slice of cells, with a shell command.
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506Read refuses an image file larger than 128 MB with an error that tells Claude to resize the image or export a smaller copy, then read that copy. If Claude stops at the error instead of doing so, see [File is too large to read as an image](/docs/en/errors#file-is-too-large-to-read-as-an-image).
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508508Read only reads files, not directories. Claude lists directory contents with a shell command such as `ls`.
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