Attachments: Two Lines of Code to Turn Any File into LLM Context

Attachments is an open-source Python library developed and maintained by Maxime Rivest, designed to be a universal bridge between any file and large language models (LLMs). With just two lines of code, it can automatically convert various files such as PDFs, images, and documents into image and text formats, directly injecting them into LLM context. The project's open-source address is https://github.com/MaximeRivest/attachments, and it was released on June 10, 2026.

In LLM application development, efficiently handling non-text files (such as PDFs, images, Word, Excel, etc.) is a common challenge. Traditional approaches require developers to handle tedious steps like file parsing and format conversion on their own, leading to complex code and easy information loss. Existing solutions are either too heavyweight with complex configurations and dependencies, or have single functions supporting only specific formats, forcing developers to compromise between ease of use and functional completeness.

Minimalist API Design

Adopts the 'convention over configuration' concept, automatically identifies file types and selects the best processing strategy, lowering the development threshold.

Multi-format Support

Covers multiple formats including documents (PDF, Word, plain text, Markdown), spreadsheets (Excel, CSV), images (PNG, JPEG, etc.), and code files.

Intelligent Conversion Strategy

• Text documents: Directly extract structured text
• Image files: Retain image data for use by multimodal models
• Complex layout documents (e.g., PDFs): Convert to image + OCR text combination to ensure layout information is not lost

File Type Detection

Uses a hybrid strategy of fast matching via file extensions + deep identification via file headers (magic bytes), balancing speed and accuracy.

Content Extraction Pipeline

1. Input normalization: Uniformly handle input forms such as file paths, URLs, and binary data
2. Format identification: Determine the file type and optimal processing method
3. Content extraction: Call the corresponding parser to extract text and/or image data
4. Output formatting: Organize into LLM-friendly formats (e.g., message lists, context blocks)

Extensibility Design

Uses a plugin architecture, supporting registration of custom file processors to easily extend support for rare formats or special needs.

RAG System Enhancement

As a document preprocessing layer, it converts various files in enterprise knowledge bases into embeddable text and image representations, improving knowledge retrieval coverage and accuracy.

Multimodal Dialogue Applications

Provides out-of-the-box file processing solutions for chatbots, supporting seamless integration of PDF reports, product images, data spreadsheets, etc., into dialogue flows.

Automated Document Processing

As a basic component for file understanding, it supports scenarios such as contract review, invoice processing, and resume screening, converting unstructured documents into structured data understandable by LLMs.

In the LLM tool ecosystem, Attachments fills the gap in the 'lightweight universal file processing' niche:

• Compared to document loaders in heavyweight frameworks like LangChain, it is more lightweight and focused
• Compared to single-format dedicated libraries like PyPDF2 and python-docx, it provides a unified abstract interface
• Compared to commercial API services, it is fully open-source and data privacy is controllable.

As an emerging project currently, it may have issues such as incomplete support for edge formats and insufficient performance and memory optimization for ultra-large-scale document processing. The long-term vision is to become a standard component for LLM application development, just like Requests for HTTP or Pandas for data processing, making file context injection effortless.

Attachments represents an important direction in the evolution of the LLM tool ecosystem towards 'developer experience first'. Through extreme API simplification, it compresses the originally complex file processing task into two lines of code, accelerating the implementation and popularization of LLM applications in more scenarios. For developers building applications such as document understanding, knowledge Q&A, and multimodal dialogue, Attachments is worth considering in their technology selection.