Add files or photos

What it is

Upload documents, images and spreadsheets into a chat so Claude can read, summarise or work with them. It’s the first entry in the + menu on the left of the chat composer, and it’s also what drag-and-drop and clipboard paste feed into.

Where to find it

On desktop

Composer → + → Add files or photos, or press ⌘ U. The entry is present in the unified + menu.

On the web

Same place on claude.ai — Composer → + → Add files or photos, ⌘ U — in the unified composer.

How to use it

Click + on the left of the composer and pick Add files or photos, or drag files onto the composer, or paste an image from the clipboard.
Choose your files and click Open.
Send your message. Claude reads the content as part of the turn.

Supported formats

Documents: PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, HTML, ODT, RTF, EPUB, JSON. XLSX works once code execution and file creation are enabled on your account.
Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP.

Limits

Uploading to a chat

500 MB per file.
Up to 20 files per chat.
Images up to 8000×8000 pixels.
PDFs up to 1000 pages. Try a longer one and you’ll get an “Uploaded file is too large” error.

Uploading to a project

30 MB per file.
No limit on the number of files, but the total has to fit inside Claude’s context window.
Text extraction only, apart from multimodal PDFs.

Good to know

PDFs of 100 pages or fewer are read for text and visuals — images, charts, graphics. From 101 to 1000 pages Claude processes the text only.
Use the page numbers your PDF viewer shows, not the ones printed on the page, when you point Claude at a specific page.
Non-PDF documents are text-only. An image embedded in a DOCX or a slide deck won’t be read.
Large files go further split up. If you’re near a limit, break the document into sections.
For what Claude can create back — PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, slides — see File creation.

What’s changed recently

2026-10-07 — Add files or photos is present in the unified + menu on both platforms. Uploads and shortcut execution were not tested.
2026-09-13 — The per-file limit for chat uploads is now 500 MB; it was 30 MB. Project files are still 30 MB each. PDFs over 1000 pages can no longer be uploaded at all, where the page previously said they were processed as text only.