Images

Every picture Pepper has made for you, or that you've sent it, in one place. This is where Pepper keeps them — you don't have to save anything anywhere. Text it a photo of a whiteboard, forward a receipt, ask it to draw something — they all land here, as a grid you can look through rather than a list of filenames.

Open it from the grid button next to the message box, or by asking ("show me my images"). It also has its own page at /apps/images.

What each picture tells you

Under every image is what Pepper knows about it, which is more than you'd guess:

• Where it came from — made by Pepper, texted in, from WhatsApp, from email, added in chat, or uploaded. Pepper works this out from the conversation the picture arrived in.
• What it asked for — for an image Pepper made, the description you gave it.
• What's in it — labels. A label with a dot beside it is Pepper's own guess from looking at the picture; one without a dot is a word you used. If a guess is wrong, say so in chat and Pepper will fix it.
• When you got it, in your timezone.

The filter box at the top narrows the grid as you type, and it searches all of that — the name, the labels, "generated", "texted in", or a word from the description you asked for.

Renaming and relabelling

Open any picture and you can Rename it — most arrive called something a camera or a mail client chose, like IMG_4021.jpg, and a name you'd actually search for is worth ten seconds.

The labels under it are editable too. Add your own with the Add a label box, and remove any of them with the ✕ — including the ones Pepper guessed. If a guess is wrong, taking it off is the correction; you don't have to explain it in chat.

References — pictures you've named

This is the part worth setting up. Open a picture and choose Use as a reference, then give it a name: Me, Ellie, the kitchen. Named references sit on a shelf at the top of the app.

Once a picture has a name, you can spend it in an ordinary sentence:

put Me on a beach at sunset

make a birthday card with Me and Ellie, watercolor

show the kitchen with open shelving above the counter

Pepper hands that picture to the image model as a reference, so the result actually looks like you, your dog, or your room — rather than a stranger who matches the description.

A good reference is a clear, well-lit photo where the subject is easy to make out. A selfie works; so does one you take right there.

The quickest way to set one up is the Add photos tile on the References shelf. It opens one box with three ways in — Upload a photo, Take a photo, Import from Gmail — and none of them is ever greyed out. Pick the picture first; the name comes after, and it's optional. Leave it blank and you've just kept the photo; type something and the same button changes from Add photo to Save reference, so you can see which of the two you're about to do. Nothing is sent until you save, so the picture and the name can arrive in either order.

Take a photo opens a viewfinder in the page with a shutter button — on a laptop as well as a phone — and your browser will ask permission for the camera the first time. If you'd rather not, or there's no camera, it falls back to picking a file.

The name field is the one thing that switches off, and only when you've picked several pictures at once: a name names one picture, so a stack of five is a plain upload.

Renaming is the same as naming: open it, choose the reference button again, type the new name. Stop using as a reference takes it off the shelf and keeps the picture.

Two references can share a name — nothing stops you naming a second photo Me, and you shouldn't have to invent Me 2 for a better picture of yourself. When you then say "put me on a beach", Pepper uses the one you named most recently and tells you which picture that was. If it picked the wrong one, rename the other and it will stop competing. Capitalisation doesn't make two names different: Me and me are the same name.

Making an image

There's no button for it, because describing what you want is the whole thing. Ask in the message box:

make an image of a fox reading a newspaper, watercolor

The result is saved here, marked as made by Pepper, with your description attached. Ask for a change ("wider", "warmer, no text") and you'll get a new one.

You can ask from anywhere you talk to Pepper, and the picture itself comes back — in the web chat, by email, and as an MMS or a WhatsApp image in a text thread. A permanent link to the picture in your library comes with it, so you can find it again later; opening that needs you signed in, as everything in your library does. Where a channel can't carry a picture at all, Pepper says so rather than quietly sending a link instead — and the link it gives you then opens straight to the image even on a phone that's never signed in, for about an hour.

In a room, anyone can ask Pepper for a picture the same way. It's attached to Pepper's reply in the room, so everyone there sees it, and it's saved with the room's shared documents. This is the room itself; a room's email or text thread doesn't carry pictures.

Adding your own

Same box as above, and there's only the one: Add photos opens it, Upload a photo takes several at once, and Take a photo opens the camera in the page — the same viewfinder, with a flip button for the front camera. Skip the name and they're just photos. You can also send a photo to Pepper in a text message, on WhatsApp, or by email, and it will show up here on its own.

Importing from Gmail

Import from Gmail looks through the last 30 days of your mail for image attachments and lists what it finds — who sent each one, what the message was called, and when. Tick the ones you want and import them; they land in your library tagged as coming from email, with the sender kept, so you can filter by it later.

This uses the Gmail access you've already granted; there's nothing extra to connect. If you have several Google accounts connected, all of them are searched.

Deleting

Open a picture and choose Delete. Pepper keeps it for a while before it's gone for good, so a mistake is recoverable — ask, and Pepper can tell you what was recently removed.

Images and Artifacts

Images aren't a separate pile: every picture is also in Artifacts (see Artifacts), along with your notes, links and files. Images is the same collection shown the way pictures want to be shown. Deleting from one deletes from both, because there is only one of each.

Things to try

• Before the whiteboard gets wiped. Send Pepper a photo of the whiteboard before it gets wiped — or the parking level, or the label on the paint can — and find it again later by what's in it.
• Make a birthday card. Pepper can make a birthday card with you and a friend in it, once each of you has a reference photo saved — "make a birthday card with Me and Ellie".