Image Analysis in Ollama

From the Ollama cheat sheet · Vision & Multimodal · verified Jul 2026

Image Analysis

Send images to vision-capable models via CLI or API.

bash

# CLI — pass an image file to a vision model
ollama run gemma3 ./photo.png "What's in this image?"

# API — send base64-encoded image
curl http://localhost:11434/api/chat -d '{
  "model": "gemma3",
  "messages": [{
    "role": "user",
    "content": "Describe this image",
    "images": ["<base64-encoded-image>"]
  }],
  "stream": false
}'

💡 Vision models include gemma3, llava, and moondream — pull one to get started

⚡ The CLI handles image encoding automatically — just pass the file path

📌 API requires base64-encoded images in the "images" array; SDKs accept file paths

🟢 You can combine multiple images in a single request for comparison tasks

visionmultimodalimages

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