How can i create the image tool ?

[hottered]

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Description

How can i create a tool, which will allow agent to read and understand the image, What should the tool return so that agent can read the image or any other binary formats. Note that i don’t want to make the tool which describes the image, instead i want to create the tool which will allow agents to read the image/images?

System Info

langchain, linux ubuntu

[Akshara-P-Vijayan]

Hi @hottered 👋

Great question! If you're building a tool for an agent to understand or extract information from an image (not just generate a caption), you’ll want to process the image into a format the agent can reason over — such as extracted text or structured JSON.

✅ Steps to Build an Image Tool in LangChain
Create a Tool
Use LangChain’s @tool decorator or Tool class.

Process the Image
Use a model or library depending on your needs:

pytesseract → OCR (extract text)

LayoutLM, Donut → structured form understanding

CLIP, BLIP, OFA → get embeddings or context

Return Data as String or Dict
Agents in LangChain expect return values as a string or dictionary (dict). So always return in that format.

📦 Minimal Example: OCR Text Reader Tool

`from langchain.tools import tool
from PIL import Image
import pytesseract

@tool
def image_text_reader(image_path: str) -> str:
"""Extracts text from an image using OCR."""
image = Image.open(image_path)
text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
return text`

This tool can now be registered with your agent — and the agent will receive the extracted text as context.