Building and customizing solutions using Microsoft 365 Copilot APIs and tools
Great technical question — you’ve hit a subtle limitation in how Teams messages are surfaced to Copilot Studio.
Key Point: -
Inline‑pasted screenshots in Microsoft Teams are not exposed as System.Activity.Attachments in Copilot Studio topics. That’s why your Power Automate flow never sees the image content — the payload doesn’t include it. Instead, Teams treats pasted images as ephemeral “inline media,” which currently isn’t passed through to Copilot Studio agents.
What's Supported: -
- File uploads (attachments): If the user uploads an image as a file (via the paperclip icon), it will appear in
System.Activity.Attachmentsand can be passed to your OCR flow. - Inline‑pasted images: These show up visually in Teams but do not populate
System.Activity.Attachments. No Power Fx formula can retrieve them because they aren’t in the activity payload. - OCR flows: Supported only when the image is a proper file attachment. Inline paste is not supported in published Teams agents today. Recommended Approach: -
- Require file upload: Guide users to upload error screenshots as files instead of pasting inline.
- Inspect payloads: Use the Bot Framework Emulator or enable logging in Copilot Studio to inspect the raw activity JSON. You’ll see that inline images are missing from
attachments. - Fallback logic: If
System.Activity.Attachmentsis empty, prompt the user: “Please upload the screenshot as a file so I can process it.” Current Limitation: - This is not a bug in your OCR flow — it’s a limitation of Teams → Copilot Studio integration. Inline‑pasted screenshots are not yet supported for downstream processing. Microsoft’s guidance is to use file attachments for scenarios like OCR.