Photos and files

Two things, each off by default and turned on separately:

• Photos in the chat. Visitors send photos and PDFs from the widget: a leaking pipe, a cracked tile, a quote from someone else.
• Files on jobs. Your team attaches photos and files to a job: installation photos, plans, signed quotes, compliance certificates.

Files are kept in your own Cloudflare account, in a private R2 bucket that helppuff deploy makes (knowtific-helppuff-<site>). Nobody can browse it. Every file is opened through a link the Worker signs, and the link expires.

Turning them on

• Dashboard: Settings → Advanced → Photos and files → Save.

• CLI:

  helppuff files chat live      # visitors send photos while a person has the chat
  helppuff files chat always    # ...or any time, to the assistant too
  helppuff files jobs on        # the team attaches files to jobs
  helppuff files status         # what is on, and whether storage is ready

• An agent: the same commands with --json. When storage is missing, the answer's next says what the person has to do (below).

Both are saved live (within a minute) and pulled into helppuff.json as files (see the Configuration reference).

One-time setup: R2

R2 has to be turned on once for your Cloudflare account. Cloudflare asks a person to accept the plan in the dashboard (it is free up to 10 GB, but Cloudflare may ask for a card), so neither the CLI nor an AI agent can do this step for you:

1. Open dash.cloudflare.com → R2 and follow Purchase R2 / Get started.
2. Run helppuff deploy (or helppuff upgrade). It makes the bucket and connects it to the Worker.

If R2 is already on for your account, there is nothing to do: deploy makes the bucket every time it can, even while files are off, so turning them on later needs no redeploy.

Until the bucket exists, files stay unavailable and the rest of HelpPuff works as before. The deploy only warns about it when files are on. helppuff doctor has a files check, and the dashboard says File storage is not set up.

npx wrangler login already covers R2. With an API token instead, add Account › Workers R2 Storage › Edit to it.

Photos in the chat

files.chat	Visitors can send files
off (default)	Never. The widget shows no paperclip and loads no upload code.
live	Only while a person has the chat (Live chat must be on). The paperclip appears when the hand-over starts.
always	Any time, to the assistant too.

Visitors can send photos (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, HEIC) and PDFs, one at a time. Before a photo leaves the browser, the widget redraws it at 1600 pixels on its longest side. A 5 MB phone photo becomes a few hundred KB, and its location data is left behind. HelpPuff reads each file's type from its bytes, not its name, and refuses anything else.

The team sees the photos in the conversation, in the dashboard's live chat and in the conversation's transcript. On Telegram, each file arrives as a link that works for a week.

What the assistant knows

By default the assistant never opens a file. With chat: always it is told one arrived ("The visitor sent a photo, "leak.jpg". You cannot see files; say the team will look at it."), so it can say the team will look.

The assistant sees photos (files.aiSeesPhotos, or helppuff files ai on) makes a vision model describe each photo once, in a few sentences: what it shows, any damage, measurements, model numbers. The assistant reads that description with the visitor's message. This costs one extra Workers AI call per photo. The default model is @cf/meta/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct. Change it with --model or files.visionModel; it must be a Workers AI model that accepts images. Descriptions are kept with the file, so a photo is never described twice.

It works with every backend, because the assistant only ever receives text.

Files on jobs

With files.jobs on, every job in the dashboard has a Files section: drop files on it or press Attach files. Photos show as thumbnails; other files as their name and size. The photos the visitor sent in the job's conversation are listed under Sent in the chat.

You can attach photos, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, CSV, MP4 and MOV files, up to files.maxJobMb (25 MB unless changed). Each file attached or removed is recorded in the job's history.

Members can attach files, and remove the ones they attached. Admins can remove any.

From the CLI or an agent:

helppuff jobs attach 1042 ./after-install.jpg ./certificate.pdf
helppuff jobs files 1042          # with links that work for 12 hours
helppuff jobs detach 1042 after-install.jpg

From your own systems, see Jobs in the API reference (POST /jobs/:id/files takes the bytes as the body; jobs:write).

Links and privacy

• The bucket is private. A file is read only through /v1/files/<site>/<chat|job>/<id>?e=…&s=…, a link signed with the Worker's secret.
• Links expire: in the dashboard and the API after 12 hours (list again for a fresh one), for the visitor when their chat does, and on Telegram after a week.
• Photos open in the browser; every other file downloads. Files are served with nosniff and a sandboxing content-security policy, so nothing in a file can run as your Worker.
• A visitor can only send files their own chat uploaded.

How long files are kept

• Chat files: files.keepChatDays (90 days unless changed), then the Worker's cron deletes them. Deleting a conversation, or a contact with its conversations, deletes its files at once.
• Job files: until someone removes them, or the job is deleted.

Limits

Setting	Default	What it bounds
files.maxChatMb	10	The largest file a visitor may send (after the photo is made smaller)
files.perConversation	10	Files one chat may send
files.keepChatDays	90	Days a chat file is kept
files.maxJobMb	25	The largest file on a job (up to 95)
security.limits.uploadsPerIpPerHour	20	Files one visitor may send an hour

All of them are on Settings → Advanced, and in the Security table. helppuff files limits --max-chat-mb 5 --keep-days 30 changes them from the CLI.

What it costs

R2's free tier is 10 GB stored, a million uploads and ten million reads a month, and no charge for downloads (see R2 pricing). With photos made smaller in the browser, that is tens of thousands of photos. The assistant sees photos adds one Workers AI call per photo (see AI models: speed, quality, cost).

Troubleshooting

• No paperclip in the widget. files.chat is off; or it is live and nobody has the chat yet (live chat must be on too); or the deployment has no bucket (helppuff files status). A change shows within a minute.
• "File storage is not set up": turn on R2 (above), then helppuff deploy.
• "This link has expired": open the file again from the dashboard, or list the job's files again.
• A photo was refused: only photos and PDFs come from visitors. Screenshots in other formats can be saved as PNG first.