Contextual Images allow your users to see relevant diagrams, screenshots, and charts from Google Drive or O365 (SharePoint/OneDrive) alongside their conversational answers in Glean Assistant. This guide explains setup, feature controls, permissions, and cost management.

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Prerequisites

  • This feature is available for all Glean hosted customers. For self-hosted customers, your deployment must be GCP-hosted.
  • Glean must be connected to at least one supported data source (Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint).

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Enabling or disabling Contextual Images

Image Rendering is enabled by default for most Glean-hosted (GCP) customers.

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To enable or disable:

  1. Go to the Admin Console.
  2. Navigate to Platform → Assistant → Settings.
  3. Toggle the Image Results option to enable or disable.
  4. Save your changes.
Disabling this feature removes contextual images from all Assistant responses for your org.

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Managing cost & captioning

Cost TypeAmountFrequencyNotes
Captioning Cost$220 per 1M imagesOne-time per imageRequired for search and relevance. Only new images are captioned.
Storage Cost$2 per 1M imagesMonthlyOngoing storage cost for indexed images

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Cost controls

For Glean hosted customers, there is no additional cost for using Contextual Images. For self-hosted customers, Glean implements monthly cost caps per deployment based on your deployment size. For most organizations, enabling image rendering will not significantly impact total monthly Glean costs. Glean expects the captioning costs to decrease after the first few months as incremental costs are incurred only for new images. If you have concerns about costs or require a broad estimation for your deployment, please contact your Glean representative.

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Permissions & security

  • Image visibility is fully governed by users’ access to source documents.
  • Glean never displays images to users who do not have the required permissions.

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Supported data sources & formats

  • Google Drive, SharePoint/OneDrive (O365)
  • Images can be standalone files or embedded inside DOCX, PPTX, PDF.
  • Google Drawings and vector images in PDFs may not be supported.

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Troubleshooting & FAQs

  • Glean will display an image only if it’s relevant to your question and if the image exists in a document that’s being used to create the answer. Images aren’t guaranteed to appear for every chat query. To increase your changes of seeing an image, add “Render an image if relevant” to the end of your question.
  • Confirm the feature is enabled and your data source connections are active.
  • Ensure user owns or has permission to view the source document.
  • Check if your deployment is GCP-hosted.
  • Use the monthly limit controls in the Admin Console.
  • Review your organization’s current image processing and storage costs under Platform → Assistant → Image Rendering.
Yes. Only users with access to the source document can see associated images.

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Further reading