Question

Your team is building an app that lets accountants upload photos of paper invoices so Claude can extract the vendor name and total amount. An engineer is designing the API request. Which statement about supplying the invoice image to the Messages API is correct?

Accepted Answer

The image is included as a content block within a user message, alongside a text block asking Claude to extract the fields.

Answer

The image must be placed in the system prompt as a base64 string so Claude treats it as background context.

Answer

Images can only be referenced by a public URL and cannot be sent as base64-encoded data.

Answer

Claude cannot process images directly; the engineer must run OCR first and send only the extracted text.