Read what a slide, page, or image actually shows — text plus charts, diagrams, screenshots, and layout — by rasterizing it and sending the picture to a vision model. This is the fix for the gap the built-in pptx and pdf skills leave: they extract embedded text only, so an image slide, a chart, or a scanned figure reads as empty. Visual transcription reads it the way a person looking at the slide would.
Transcribing Images is a community-contributed Claude Code skill in the general-misc sub-category. It ships as a SKILL.md file that Claude Code auto-discovers under ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images/ and loads when your prompt matches the skill's trigger.
When to invoke it: Use when a PPTX or PDF has image slides, screenshots, charts, scanned figures, or flattened-to-image layouts that the built-in pptx/pdf skills read as empty; when asked to transcribe, describe, OCR, or extract what is shown in an image, slide deck, or document page; or when embedded-text extraction returned little or nothing from a visually rich file. Triggers on 'read this deck', 'what's on these slides', 'transcribe', 'OCR', 'extract text from image', 'describe this chart/diagram', .
The Transcribing Images Claude Code skill is built for Claude Code users and developers across all disciplines looking for general-purpose AI assistance. It's part of ClaudSkills (also referred to as Claude Skills or Claude Code Skills) — the open community-curated registry of 174,000+ SKILL.md files for Anthropic's Claude Code agent and the wider Claude ecosystem (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK).
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/transcribing-images/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images/SKILL.md
Or just download SKILL.md directly and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images/. Claude Code auto-discovers it on next session.
Skills live at ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images/SKILL.md on macOS/Linux, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\transcribing-images\SKILL.md on Windows. See the full install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Open @claudskills_bot on Telegram, tap Open Desktop App, and the desktop app installs this skill for you. Or share the bot link with a colleague — they get the same one-tap install. Learn more →
The ClaudSkills desktop app installs any skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/ with one click — no terminal required. Pro starts at $9/mo or $149 lifetime.
For the full experience including quality scoring and one-click install features for each skill — upgrade to Pro.
SKILL.md from the source repository to ~/.claude/skills/transcribing-images/SKILL.md and restart Claude Code. Both flows are detailed at claudskills.com/install/.SKILL.md file that lives under ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ and tells the Claude Code CLI agent how to perform a specific task (instructions, prompts, allowed tools). Skills are auto-discovered at session start. Transcribing Images is one of 67,000+ skills indexed in the open ClaudSkills catalog, classified under the General category. Learn more at /learn/what-is-a-claude-skill/.If you reference this skill in a blog post, paper, or documentation, you can cite it as:
@misc{transcribing-images-2026,
author = {oaustegard},
title = {Transcribing Images [Claude Code skill]},
year = {2026},
publisher = {ClaudSkills},
url = {https://claudskills.com/skills/transcribing-images/}
}Grade A · scanned 2026-08-02 — free static scan against the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10.
No risk patterns were found in any of the ten OWASP-aligned categories. How grading works ›
Browse all General skills in the ClaudSkills registry, or explore these other picks from the same category:
Part of Acreator Store — Adam Lankamer's AI tools: PerfectStudio · Ucaption · UTagger · AutoXPoster · TestYourSkills · AutomationFlows · Au Naturel · Telegram @acreatorstore
SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.