Best Free LLM APIs for Vision

Vision-capable LLMs can process images and answer questions about them. Here's what matters:

• Image modality support — The model must explicitly list "image" in its modality. Not all multimodal models support images — some are text+audio only. Each model card on free-model.com shows modality tags.
• Resolution handling — Most vision LLMs resize images to a fixed resolution before processing. High-resolution details (small text in screenshots, fine print in documents) may be lost. Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-OSS handle higher effective resolutions than older vision models.
• Multi-image support — Can you upload multiple images in one prompt? This matters for comparing screenshots, before/after analysis, or multi-page documents. Check each model's documentation for image count limits.
• Visual reasoning depth — Some models can describe what's in an image; others can reason about it (e.g., "what's wrong with this UI?" or "diagnose this medical scan"). Gemini and Qwen VL variants are known for stronger visual reasoning.
• Video support — Video understanding is a superset of image support. Gemini 2.5 Flash can process video frames natively. Most other free vision models handle images only.

Vision model selection depends on what you're analyzing:

• Screenshots / UI analysis? → You need high-resolution handling and good visual reasoning. Gemini 2.5 Flash leads here among free models.
• Document / OCR tasks? → Look for models that preserve text fidelity at high resolution. Test with a dense document first — many vision models lose fine text.
• Photo description / alt text generation? → Most vision models handle this well. Llama 4 Scout (10M ctx via Cloudflare) and Gemini are both good choices.
• Video analysis? → Gemini 2.5 Flash is the only free model with native video support at scale.
• Batch processing many images? → Prioritize rate limits. NVIDIA NIM (40 RPM, no daily cap) is better than Google AI Studio (10 RPM, 250 RPD) for high-volume workflows.