openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature request: configurable timeout for the image tool

Problem

The image tool has a hardcoded ~60s timeout for image description. When using slow local vision models (e.g., quantized models running mmproj on CPU), this timeout is too short. A 1024px image processed by a local model on CPU can take 60-90+ seconds, causing the tool to time out.

Current behavior

• The image tool times out after ~59-60 seconds regardless of provider-level timeoutSeconds config
• models.providers.*.timeoutSeconds is NOT respected by the image tool
• The provider timeout was confirmed set to 300s but the image tool still killed the request at ~60s

Workaround

Calling the model API directly via curl with --max-time 300 works perfectly (~17s for 1024px resize). But this requires bypassing the image tool entirely.

Requested feature

Add a configurable timeout for the image tool, for example:

{
  "agents": {
    "defaults": {
      "image": {
        "timeoutSeconds": 300
      }
    }
  }
}

Or have the image tool respect the existing models.providers.*.timeoutSeconds setting.

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.5.20
• Local model: Qwen 3.6 27B via ik-llama-cpp (mmproj on CPU, LLM on GPU)
• Provider: LiteLLM proxy with timeoutSeconds: 300