Terminal Images

Qwen Code can display image parts from assistant responses and completed tool results directly in the interactive terminal UI. This display path is separate from Markdown rendering and behaves the same in Markdown render and raw modes.

Where Images Appear

In assistant responses, text and images keep their original order. Tool rows show the result text followed by images for successful, failed, and cancelled results.

Other output surfaces, including headless, ACP, daemon/Web Shell, and IDE integrations, do not render image parts. The WeChat (weixin), WeCom, and DingTalk channels can still deliver agent-generated image files through their [IMAGE: ...] marker flow; other IM channels do not currently deliver outbound images.

Terminal Support

Environment	Image display
Direct Kitty or Ghostty TTY, without tmux or SSH	Native terminal image placement
Other terminals with `chafa` installed	256-color ANSI preview, including in iTerm2, Warp, tmux, and SSH sessions
No compatible renderer, or screen-reader mode (inline image parts)	Deterministic text such as `[image: 1024x768 png]` instead of a terminal image sequence

Limits and Fallbacks

Inline pixel previews currently require valid PNG data within the display limits: 64 megapixels total and at most 1,000,000 pixels per side. Other image formats, invalid PNGs, and inline PNGs exceeding those limits remain visible as text placeholders.

Inline image payloads larger than 8 MiB are not pixel-rendered. Most oversized payloads are dropped before entering TUI history, while payloads marginally over the limit may remain as text placeholders because admission is based on encoded size. Each assistant response or tool row displays at most four images and reports the remainder with a marker such as [+2 more images].

Session History and Memory

Tool image parts are saved with their results and can be reconstructed after session resume. Assistant images render live but are not currently persisted, so --continue and --resume restore the assistant text without those images.

To bound memory in long or image-heavy sessions, the TUI may replace older displayed images with markers such as [Old assistant image content cleared] or [Old tool result content cleared]. This affects only the live view. Tool image parts remain in the session record and reappear after resume.