Perplexed Gets Its Images Back, and Finds a Product's Own Screenshots

Why Care?

Perplexed used to put images in the notes it wrote. Then it stopped, with no error and nothing in the logs. Every request still succeeded; the images just never came back.

The cause was on Perplexity's side. Its Sonar Chat Completions API is winding down, and requests to it are now quietly rewritten for its newer Agent API, which has no return_images option. A note asking for images got a well-cited answer and an empty image list.

Images now come from Perplexity's image search, which the Agent API offers as a separate tool. While we were there, we fixed the other image problem our toolkit notes always had: a ## Screenshots section that never had any screenshots in it.

What's New?

• Images are back in directory templates and Ask Perplexity. Perplexed runs Perplexity's image search alongside the written answer, at the same time as the written answer, so it adds little or no time to a run.

• Fetch screenshots from website. A new command reads the note's url, searches only that site for product screenshots, and adds the largest ones under ## Screenshots, each with a link to the page it came from. When the site shows none, it uses the note's og_image.

• Nothing gets overwritten. If ## Screenshots already holds images, from an earlier run or from Metafetch's screenshot command, the new ones go after them. A placeholder like "none publicly available" is replaced.

• No more hanging. Image search gives up after 30 seconds and the note is written without images, instead of the run waiting forever.

How It Works

The image search is one call to Perplexity's Agent API with its image_search tool forced on:

{
  "effort": "fast",
  "input": "Linear app https://linear.app",
  "tools": [{ "type": "image_search", "max_results": 8,
              "filters": { "domain_filter": ["linear.app"] } }],
  "tool_choice": { "type": "image_search" },
  "max_output_tokens": 200
}

Forcing the tool matters. Without tool_choice, the model decided most queries didn't need images and returned none. The domain_filter is what makes screenshots work: asking the open web for "Linear screenshots" returns review sites and stock art, while asking linear.app returns Linear's own product shots.

Results come back as an image_search_results item with each image's URL, source page, and size. For screenshots, Perplexed drops anything narrower than 800 pixels, which removes logos and avatars, and keeps the largest.

Good to Know

• Image search costs $2.50 per 1,000 calls on Perplexity, billed to the same key.

• Two older commands still use the old option. Find images for selection and enhance with images place images paragraph by paragraph and need a rewrite, not a swap. They return no images until that's done.

• Why the toolkit template never found screenshots: it asked the writing model to list screenshot URLs from memory, and it set return-images: false. The new command searches for them instead.

• Tested by unit tests and live calls to Perplexity's API. The screenshot command has had less use inside Obsidian than the template path.

The full story of the Perplexity change is in our keeping-up post, Perplexity Sonar Pro Images Deprecated.