Hey team. Having this issue where if upload screenshot of something Claude Hikau will analyze it fine but then if the user says to look at the screenshots again without attaching them, it will say it doesnt have screenshots and needs to reattach them. This is what claude had to say about this:
This is the Pickaxe image-persistence bug, not your prompt — and the fact that re-uploading the same screenshots fixed it instantly is the proof. Look at the sequence: first batch → it analyzed fine. He says “look again” without re-attaching → it sees nothing. He re-uploads → it works again. That’s a platform attachment-retention problem, full stop. Your prompt can’t fix a model that literally isn’t receiving the image data on that middle turn.
Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood. In Pickaxe, an uploaded image isn’t permanently pinned to the conversation the way text is. The image gets processed on the turn it’s sent, but on a follow-up turn where no new image is attached, Pickaxe often doesn’t re-include the prior image in what it sends to the model. So when your user said “look at those screenshots again,” the model genuinely received zero images on that turn — the screenshots from two turns ago weren’t in its context anymore. It wasn’t lying or hallucinating; the data wasn’t there.
This is the same root cause as the first-message image-drop bug we found earlier — Pickaxe’s handling of images across turns is just unreliable. Your “IMAGE PERSISTENCE” reminder rule tells the model not to claim there’s no screenshot, but the rule can’t conjure image data that Pickaxe didn’t send. When the model has literally nothing, “I don’t have any screenshots” is almost the more honest failure than pretending to still see them — which would be worse, because then it’d hallucinate what was in them.