Codex Pet FAQ: The Ten Questions Readers Ask Most

Codex pet questions about images and files

Every month the same twenty codex pet questions arrive, and about five of them carry most of the volume. This codex pet FAQ is that end-of-month pile, answered in one place instead of one reply at a time.

Uploads sit at the top of the list, and the fix is nearly always the source photo rather than the generator. WebP is the format Codex loads. JPG and PNG upload fine and come back converted. A photo around 2000 pixels on the long edge gives a cleaner spritesheet than a full resolution phone shot, and cropping to the animal first does more than any setting after the fact.

• WebP is what Codex loads; JPG and PNG upload fine
• Crop to the animal before you upload, not afterwards
• Around 2000 pixels on the long edge is plenty
• A spritesheet that refuses to play is usually a renamed file, not a broken conversion

Pet troubleshooting FAQ: my pet stopped showing up

Three causes cover almost every invisible pet, and none of them is the pet file itself. A Codex desktop update moves the pets folder lookup path on a small share of installs. Hiding during screen share is on by default in some builds. And a pet whose WebP was swapped out by hand renders nothing at all, without throwing an error.

Check them in that order. Two minutes spent here saves reinstalling the whole thing.

• Turn off the screen share hiding toggle first, it catches more people than anything else
• Confirm the folder still sits under the pets directory on that machine
• Reinstall the pet rather than editing the WebP yourself
• If pets vanish after every update, keep your backup outside the app directory

Privacy questions from the reader QA pile

Photo privacy is the second biggest thread. The upload travels over TLS, waits in a job queue while the spritesheet renders, and is deleted on a 24 hour timer. No account is attached to it. Once the folder lands on your machine, nothing inside it makes a network request.

What I still refuse to do is upload anything with a recognizable child or a document in frame. Any upload to any service becomes a copy you no longer control, and 24 hours is still 24 hours.

• Strip EXIF data yourself before the upload goes out
• Upload a crop rather than the original full frame
• Assume any upload exists somewhere else afterwards
• Skip photos you cannot afford to have copied

Reader QA: how many pets should one machine carry

There is no hard limit, the pets folder is just a folder. Past four or five, people stop noticing the extras, and the animation frames start competing for attention whenever anything moves. Two is where most readers settle after experimenting.

One thing worth knowing early: pet state is per machine. A pet you install at the office stays at the office until you copy the folder over, and that copy is the only sync mechanism that exists.

• Two pets is where people land after trying more
• Each one adds nine animation states of frames to render
• Nothing syncs on its own, copying the folder is the whole story
• Old pets cost nothing to keep, they cost attention

The odd ones worth keeping from this month

Two reader qa entries deserve a permanent home because the questions were better than my answers. Can you make a pet from a drawing instead of a photo? Yes, and flat color illustrations convert more cleanly than most photographs. Does the pet slow the model down? No, it draws beside the conversation and touches nothing in the request path.

Can a pet react to failing builds? Not in a way I would trust yet. Custom state hooks exist, and almost nobody wires them up, myself included.

• Drawings convert better than busy photographs
• The pet sits beside the model, not inside it
• Token usage does not move when a pet is on
• Custom state hooks exist and stay unused by nearly everyone

Where to go next

Formats get their own side by side comparison at /blog/codex-pet-image-formats-jpg-png-webp, and the invisible pet walkthrough is at /blog/installation-troubleshooting. If the question was about your photo rather than the pet, that answer sits at /blog/is-the-pet-generator-private.

The rest of the archive is at /blog. Month end answers like this one get pulled from whatever actually landed in the inbox, so if yours did not make the cut this time, send it again.