
Who’s it for
Teams and makers who want a plug-and-play vision bot: users send a photo in Telegram, the bot returns a concise description plus OCR text. No custom servers required—just n8n, a Telegram bot, and an AIMLAPI key.
What it does / How it works
The workflow listens for new Telegram messages, fetches the highest-resolution photo, converts it to base64, normalizes the MIME type, and calls AIMLAPI (GPT-4o Vision) via the HTTP Request node using the OpenAI-compatible messages
format with an image_url
data URI. The model returns a short caption and extracted text. The answer is sent back to the same Telegram chat.
Requirements
- n8n instance (self-hosted or cloud)
- Telegram bot token (from @BotFather)
- AIMLAPI account and API key (OpenAI-compatible endpoint)
How to set up
- Create a Telegram bot with @BotFather and copy the token.
- In n8n, add Telegram credentials (no hardcoded tokens in nodes).
- Add AIMLAPI credentials with your API key (base URL:
https://api.aimlapi.com/v1
).
- Import the workflow JSON and connect credentials in the nodes.
- Execute the trigger and send a photo to your bot to test.
How to customize the workflow
- Modify the vision prompt (e.g., add brand, language, or formatting rules).
- Switch models within AIMLAPI (any vision-capable model using the same
messages
schema).
- Add an IF branch for text-only messages (reply with guidance).
- Log usage to Google Sheets or a database (user id, file id, response).
- Add rate limits, user allowlists, or Markdown formatting in Telegram responses.
- Increase timeouts/retries in the HTTP Request node for long-running images.