Skip to main content
Cohere

Search documentation

Type to search this documentation.

On this pageOverview

Document Parsing - best practices

Use Case Format Resize Notes
General Parsing (recommended) WebP 90 2048/1536px long side Good balance for most workloads
Tables, financial, high precision docs PNG or JPEG 95 2048px long side Preserves fine lines and cell borders

For throughput: resize to 1536px on the long side before sending. Minimal loss in parsing quality while significantly improving throughput.

The key operation is thumbnail which resizes in-place while preserving aspect ratio:

PYTHON
from PIL import Image

IMG_MAX_SIZE = 2048

with Image.open("page.png") as img:
    img.thumbnail(
        (IMG_MAX_SIZE, IMG_MAX_SIZE), Image.Resampling.LANCZOS
    )
    if img.mode != "RGB":
        img = img.convert("RGB")
    img.save("page.webp", format="WEBP", quality=90)
PYTHON
import os
import base64
import cohere

co = cohere.ClientV2(
    "COHERE_API_KEY"
)  # Get your free API key here: https://dashboard.cohere.com/api-keys

with open("page.webp", "rb") as f:
    b64 = base64.b64encode(f.read()).decode()

data_uri = f"data:image/webp;base64,{b64}"

response = co.parse(
    model="parse-v5.0",
    document={"type": "image_url", "image_url": data_uri},
)

for page in response.pages:
    print(page.markdown.content)
Suggest an edit

Propose a replacement for this page. The site team reviews it before applying any changes.

Export
Documentation menu