Web search & image understanding
Two Playground capabilities that are often confused with each other.
Web search
Enable it in the Tools menu: sending a message first runs a web search and injects the result summary as context for that turn, with the sources listed underneath.
- Included with your plan — available from Starter upward; the Free plan does not include it, and each plan has its own monthly search quota. See Subscription plans.
basicsearch depth, up to 3 results- Returns title / URL / snippet / source / time only
- Rate-limited; results are not logged and not stored locally
- Turning it off stops injection immediately
If web search is not part of your plan, the request returns
WEB_SEARCH_NOT_ENABLED.
Image understanding (vision)
This is no longer a beta capability. Image input is a standard feature of the Gemini model families: attach an image and the model sees it directly.
- Available on any plan that can use the model in question — see Subscription plans
- Up to 3 files per message; native media (image / audio / video) sent inline is capped at 15 MB per file
- jpg / png / webp and the other formats listed in File upload
- Images are not persisted, not logged, and not kept in the session or local storage
If you pick a model that cannot read images, the Playground blocks sending and asks you to remove the attachment or switch model — it never silently falls back to OCR-ing the image into text.
Some models also accept PDF, audio and video natively; the model picker shows what each one supports.