media.Normalize refused (ErrUnsupported) when a request carried more images than
the target's MaxImagesPerReq, on the theory that a failover chain would try a
roomier target. In practice the chain's targets share the same cap — an agent loop
that accumulates a preview image per iteration (e.g. scaddy's write_scad) blows
past the cap, EVERY target rejects ("9 images, target allows at most 8"), and the
run dies. Observed live on ollama-cloud (cap 8).
Now: over-count keeps the most-recent MaxImagesPerReq images and replaces each
older one with a short text placeholder ("[earlier image omitted to fit this
model's per-request image limit]"), preserving each message's turn structure and
telling the model an image was elided. The most-recent images are the relevant
ones in an iterative run. Copy-on-write; the input request is never mutated. The
per-model threshold stays configurable via Capabilities.MaxImagesPerReq (0 still
means no image support); SupportsImages / MIME / byte-budget / dimension behavior
is unchanged, and the provider-side count backstop remains.
Test: TestNormalizeTooManyImages_DropsOldest — 3 images, cap 2 → 2 kept (the most
recent), 1 placeholder, no error, oldest dropped, input unmutated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
steve
d71aca4c3a