Built-in Attach appshots are too blurry for text recognition, making the feature unreliable

Open 💬 0 comments Opened Jun 3, 2026 by GGBondBlueWhale

Codex app version

26.601.21317 — released Jun 2, 2026

Platform

macOS Tahoe 26.5
Apple Silicon MacBook Pro
Pro plan

Summary

Codex Desktop's built-in Attach/appshot feature can capture an app screenshot at such low visual clarity that the attached image becomes effectively unusable for text recognition.

In the affected case, I attached a StepLens appshot through Codex. The attached screenshot looked visibly blurry, especially around dense UI text and terminal/log text. When opening the attachment's View text mode, Codex was unable to extract the actual visible text from the app. The text view only showed a minimal result like:

Window: "", App: StepLens.

It did not capture the important text content that was clearly present in the app window.

Observed behavior

The built-in Attach/appshot feature creates a blurry image.
Dense UI text becomes hard to read.
OCR / View text fails to extract meaningful text from the attached appshot.
The resulting attachment is not useful for asking Codex to reason about the visible app state.

Expected behavior

Attach/appshot should preserve enough resolution and sharpness for Codex to reliably read visible UI text, terminal output, logs, labels, buttons, and other app content.

If the image is too blurry for text recognition, the attach feature becomes much less useful, because the whole point is to provide the current app context to Codex.

Actual behavior

The attached appshot is blurry enough that text recognition fails. View text does not return the important visible text, only minimal app/window metadata.

Why this matters

This makes the built-in Attach feature feel like a placeholder instead of a reliable workflow feature. If Codex cannot read the attached appshot clearly, users may be better off using the system screenshot tool or third-party screenshot tools instead.

For example, macOS screenshots or WeChat's Control + Command + A screenshot workflow can produce clearer screenshots than the current Codex appshot attachment. That should not be necessary for a first-party Codex app context feature.

Request

Please improve the resolution/clarity of built-in Attach/appshot captures so that text recognition works reliably.

Possible improvements:

Capture at native display scale / Retina scale instead of downsampling too aggressively.
Avoid compression that destroys small text readability.
Preserve sufficient resolution for dense UI and terminal/log text.
Validate appshot quality by testing OCR/text extraction on real app windows.
If compression is required, use a higher-quality preview for model/OCR input than the small UI thumbnail.

Attach/appshot should be clear enough that Codex can actually read the visible UI text. Otherwise users have to bypass the built-in feature with external screenshot tools, which defeats the purpose of Attach.

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