When using --image with exec codex hangs

[SawyerHood]

What version of Codex is running?

0.25.0

Which model were you using?

gpt-5-med

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Running:

codex exec "Tell me what you see" --image "/Users/sawyerhood/Downloads/shapes\ at\ 25-08-19\ 17.28.40.png"

Hangs the codex cli (it never exits or responds even left for 10 minutes)

This happens with any image I pass it.

What is the expected behavior?

I expect Codex to respond.

What do you see instead?

➜  terragon git:(main) codex exec "Tell me what you see" --image "/Users/sawyerhood/Downloads/shapes\ at\ 25-08-19\ 17.28.40.png"
[2025-08-27T20:34:46] OpenAI Codex v0.25.0 (research preview)
--------
workdir: /Users/sawyerhood/terragon
model: gpt-5
provider: openai
approval: never
sandbox: read-only
reasoning effort: medium
reasoning summaries: auto
--------
[2025-08-27T20:34:46] User instructions:
Tell me what you see

This and it never responds

Additional information

No response

[oyiakoumis]

I raised a PR with a proposed fix: #2843

I also discovered another bug with images and codex exec: when the image path was placed directly into the prompt, it was treated as plain text, so the model could only access its metadata rather than opening it.

With the fix, both of the following now work as expected:

• codex exec --image ./photo.jpg "describe this"
• codex exec "what do you see in ./photo.jpg?"