Sending images
The three ways to supply an image, supported formats, the 30 MB cap, and what the quality gate rejects.
Index, search, detect and selfie registration all take exactly one image source per request.
Three ways to send an image
A public HTTPS URL. SightRadar fetches it server-side. This is the only input batch accepts.
curl -X POST "$SR_BASE/v1/collections/demo/index" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://cdn.example.com/photos/1234.jpg", "photoId": "1234"}'Search additionally accepts a precomputed embedding (512 numbers) instead of an image, and compare accepts source_embedding / target_embedding. An embedding side is not a processed photo and is not charged as one.
Formats
JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC/HEIF, TIFF, GIF and BMP are decoded natively. iPhone HEIC and WebP work without pre-conversion. Animated GIFs use the first frame.
Size
The encoded image may be at most 30 MB; larger returns 413. Faces smaller than the quality gate's minimum are skipped, so downscaling a 40 MB photo to 4,000 px on its longest side loses nothing useful and uploads faster.
The quality gate
Detection finds every face; the quality gate decides which are worth keeping. A face is rejected when it is too small (min_px below the threshold), too blurry, too oblique, or the detector's confidence (det_score) is low. Index reports detected_face_count and rejected_face_count so you can see both numbers; Detect returns every face with a quality_passed flag, which makes it the right pre-check for upload validation ("is there exactly one clear face?").
Zero faces is a success
A valid image with no usable face returns 200 with indexed: 0 and is charged like any other photo. Only decode failures (400) and engine errors (502, refunded automatically) are free.
Bounding boxes
Boxes are absolute pixels (x, y, w, h) in the decoded image's coordinate space, EXIF orientation applied. Rekognition returns ratios; if you are porting code, divide by the image dimensions (the Rekognition shim does this for you when given the size).