ollama: attaching a file does not work/results in error 500/400 Bad request

Steps to reproduce:

llms --serve 8080 --verbose, access web UI
select ollama provider (tested with multiple models)
attach a file (tested with multiple text files/shell/python scripts) with a promt su chas Please summarize this document and submit the query
the web UI displays an error and not response is returned

HTTP 500 Internal Server Error
{
  "error": "HTTP 400 Bad Request"
}

Logs:

provider: ollama OllamaProvider
POST http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions
{
  "model": "deepseek-r1:14b",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "file",
          "file": {
            "filename": "test.xml",
            "file_data": "data:text/xml;base64,(1325)"
          }
        },
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "Summarize the file\n\n[\ud83d\udcce test.xml]"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "enable_thinking": true,
  "metadata": {
    "threadId": "1765739448549"
  },
  "stream": false
}
Provider ollama failed: HTTP 400 Bad Request

Interestingly, attaching an image file and asking the ollama model to describe it works as expected.
I see it uses "type": "image_url" instead of "type": "file"

Details

provider: ollama OllamaProvider
Resized image from 1754x1403 to 1280x1024
Converted image to WebP: 798373 bytes -> 235210 bytes (29%)
POST http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions
{
  "model": "qwen3-vl:8b",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": [
        {
          "type": "image_url",
          "image_url": {
            "url": "data:image/webp;base64,(313617)"
          }
        },
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "Describe the key features of the input image\n\n[\ud83d\uddbc\ufe0f Snowden_Slights_with_big_gun_YORYM-S364.jpg]"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "enable_thinking": true,
  "metadata": {
    "threadId": "1765745070478"
  },
  "stream": false
}
{
  "id": "chatcmpl-198",
  "object": "chat.completion",
  "created": 1765745083,
  "model": "qwen3-vl:8b",
  "system_fingerprint": "fp_ollama",
  "choices": [
    {
      "index": 0,
      "message": {
        "role": "assistant",
        "content": "This black - and - white photograph presents a historical scene with several prominent features:  [...].",
        "reasoning": "So, let's describe the key features of this black-and-white photograph. [...]."
      },
      "finish_reason": "stop"
    }
  ],
  "usage": {
    "prompt_tokens": 1328,
    "completion_tokens": 687,
    "total_tokens": 2015
  },
  "metadata": {
    "duration": 12785,
    "pricing": "0/0"
  }
}

      "content": [
        {
          "type": "file",
          "file": {
            "filename": "test.xml",
            "file_data": "data:text/xml;base64,(1325)"
          }

I don't think this is supposed to be supported at all by the API (https://docs.ollama.com/api/openai-compatibility), am I correct? This issue seems to support my conclusion ollama/ollama#5762

I think the only correct way to achieve this, would be to have llms.py extract the content of the file and pass it to the LLM through the prompt.

I can't find any official way that Ollama supports to send file attachments like PDFs, the standard OpenAI compatible way works if I call the same model on OpenRouter (e.g. Gemma 3n 4B) so I don't think it's supported.

I'll wait for official support from Ollama, which I expect will just be to implement OpenAI's file type support, like they do with image_url when they added support for it.

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

ollama: attaching a file does not work/results in error 500/400 Bad request #11

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

ollama: attaching a file does not work/results in error 500/400 Bad request #11

Description

Activity

nodiscc commented on Dec 14, 2025

nodiscc commented on Dec 14, 2025

mythz commented on Dec 15, 2025

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions