Files in a conversation
What you can attach, the limits, and the moment to stop attaching and start using a collection.
What you can attach
Documents. PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx), Excel (.xlsx), CSV, plain text, Markdown, RTF, JSON, XML, YAML and most code and config files.
Images. JPG, PNG, WebP and SVG. Screenshots, photographs of a whiteboard, scanned pages, a chart from someone else's deck.
Spreadsheets and CSVs are treated as data rather than prose: Asteria can calculate over them, filter them and chart them, not merely quote them.
Limits per message
- 5 documents and 10 images
- 50 MB per file
- The combined content of everything in the conversation also has a ceiling. Cross it and Asteria tells you plainly rather than quietly dropping something.
What happens to each type
PDFs have their text extracted. Scanned PDFs with no text layer are read visually instead, which works well for a handful of pages and poorly for two hundred.
Word, PowerPoint and Excel are read as documents: structure, sheets and slides included, not just a flat dump.
Spreadsheets with several sheets prompt you to pick which to include, with a count of how many you selected. Choose deliberately. Including three irrelevant sheets is a common cause of a confidently wrong answer.
Images are looked at by the model. You can ask about what is in them: "what does this chart show", "transcribe this whiteboard", "which of these two layouts has the clearer hierarchy".
When to use a collection instead
Attachments belong to one conversation. Tomorrow's chat cannot see them. If you are attaching the same files repeatedly, or you have more than a handful, you want a collection.
Asteria will tell you itself when you cross the line. Two messages exist for exactly this:
- "Document too large for chat." The file is too big to analyse directly. Put it in a collection, where it gets split up and searched properly rather than read end to end.
- "Document limit reached." The conversation as a whole is carrying too much. Same answer.
This is not a fobbing off. A collection genuinely gives better answers on large documents, because Asteria retrieves the relevant sections and cites them rather than trying to hold the whole thing in mind at once. A 300 page PDF in a collection beats the same PDF attached to a chat.
Collections also accept much larger files, up to 250 MB, because they upload straight to storage rather than through the chat.
Storage
Everything you upload counts against your personal storage allowance: chat attachments, collections, Workshop files and agent files alike. You can see the breakdown in your profile.
As you approach the limit you get a warning. At the limit, uploads are blocked until you delete something or your administrator raises your allowance.
Deleting files
Files uploaded to a conversation are deleted with the conversation. There is no separate file manager for chat attachments: if you want something gone, delete the conversation, and if you want to keep the conversation but free the space, that is a good sign the files belonged in a collection.