Yesterday on January 16th, 2026 I was offered a ChatGPT 30-days free trial which I accepted.
Note: The offer was real because I got it directly on the official chatgpt[.]com webpage when I was about to ask ChatGPT something and I also got a confirmation mail for it. (Not that anyone thinks I fell for a scam or something)
Since then ChatGPT tells me that it cannot view or read any images or files that I uploaded and strangely enough, this happened after the exact same amount of images and files that I can also upload with the free plan.
I can confidently confirm this because I tried to upload the exact same images with another ChatGPT account of mine that uses the free plan and there it could view or describe the images that I’ve uploaded.
After the amount that I normally can also upload with the free plan, it began to tell me:
It looks like the two files that came through are not showing the sapling images (they appear as corrupted/placeholder text patterns on my side).
Update:
- It’s been roughly 30 hours after ChatGPT stopped being able to view my uploaded images and files. With a free plan I usually can upload images again after 24h but my ChatGPT Plus Trial account still says it can’t view my images, whereas my free plan account can view all of them.
- Apparently my ChatGPT Plus Trial account has become completely broken now in terms of uploading and viewing images and reading files now. I tried to upload an image in a new chat (witht he same account) and it still is unable to view it. ChatGPT gives me this error: imgur[.]com/a/rxUovZw (it doesn’t even show me the uploaded image. instead it only shows a small warning symbol)
- It’s more than 2 days now and ChatGPT Plus Trial account is still not able to view my images.
The test image I uploaded in a new chat was a meme downloaded in .png from Reddit: imgur[.]com/a/b8sRpSK
The result of my free plan account after uploading the exact same Reddit .png meme: imgur[.]com/a/8iKgei4
This is happening to me too, please let me now if a fix is found
This has been happening to me for the past week. I opened a support ticket but have been back and forth with their support guy who’s not been that helpful so far. Asking for a video upload of the issue. Send it. Sorry we can’t accept 3rd party sharing services (wetransfer), try upload it to the help centre. I can’t send videos through the help centre as it only allows image uploads. No response for days. No images work still. It’s a fault their end as I’ve tested everything and gpt can even tell me what size the image is and all its properties but when asked, says the image is just of a repeating string of characters. I’d encourage people to complain through help centre as well as on here until they figure out why it’s decoding wrong.
iOS app, and web app, both fail, paid customer for years and issue only presented in last week. Works fine with Claude and all other apps.
Doing the same for me. I tried it on my iPhone, and my macbook and nothing is working. When I send anything, it will tell me, “It looks like you just sent a long repeated string of text.” I’ve also got, “it looks like you uploaded grey images, what can I assist with on these?”
Not sure why this is happening but its super annoying. I’ve been using GPT for awhile now and have been paying for the plus, but this has never happened to me.
Hoping they get a fix out soon!
Hi. I found this article because I had the same issue and I tried Googling for a solution, I wanted to leave my solution here because I wasn’t able to find one anywhere else. For me, it told me that all of my images looked like static, textured, or corrupted images, and I had been experiencing this issue for a whole week
How I fixed this was by switching my GPT model. I was on GPT 5.2, but at the top left corner of your chat, you can switch the model that your AI uses, and I switched mine to the GPT-4o legacy model. It’s been able to see all of my images and videos ever since across all of my conversations. Maybe some GPT models such as the latest one is just incapable of reading files.
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