Feature: Support inline image viewing in conversations

Summary

Add a way for Claude Code to display images (PNG, JPG, etc.) inline within the CLI conversation — or at least open them in the user's default image viewer automatically.

Motivation

Frontend developers constantly work with visual output: screenshots, generated UI previews, golden test comparisons, design mockups, etc. Currently, Claude Code can read image files (it's multimodal), but there's no way to show an image back to the user during a conversation.

This creates a friction loop:

1. Claude generates or references an image file
2. The user has to manually navigate to the file and open it
3. Then come back to the conversation to continue

A built-in mechanism to display or surface images would make visual workflows (UI iteration, screenshot comparison, design-to-code) significantly smoother.

Proposed solutions (any of these would help)

1. Inline image rendering — for terminals that support it (iTerm2 inline images protocol, Kitty graphics protocol, Sixel)
2. Auto-open in default viewer — open <file> / xdg-open <file> when Claude wants to show an image
3. Image reference links — clickable file:// links in the terminal output that open the image
4. Web preview panel — if Claude Code ever gets a web-based UI, render images directly

Use cases

• Golden test workflows: Generate screenshots → compare old vs new visually → iterate
• Figma-to-code: Compare generated UI against design mockups
• UI debugging: "Show me what this widget looks like" → render → display
• Chart/diagram generation: Display generated visualizations without leaving the CLI

Thanks for considering this!