Codex App crashes when reopening an existing conversation with extensive ImageGen usage #24318

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Latest at May 24th

What subscription do you have?

Plus

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 x64

What issue are you seeing?

The Codex App crashes systematically when attempting to reopen an existing conversation that contains heavy ImageGen usage.

The crash does not seem to happen during normal text-only conversations, but appears when a conversation has generated or manipulated many images through ImageGen. Once the conversation reaches that state, trying to load it again causes the app to crash instead of restoring the thread.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Open the Codex App.
2. Start a conversation using ImageGen extensively.
3. Generate or edit multiple images in the same conversation.
4. Leave the conversation.
5. Attempt to reopen the existing conversation from the conversation history.
6. The app crashes during or immediately after loading the conversation.

What is the expected behavior?

The existing conversation should load normally, including its text messages and ImageGen-related content.

If some assets are too heavy or unavailable, the app should degrade gracefully by showing placeholders, partial content, or an error message instead of crashing.

Additional information

Actual Behavior

The Codex App crashes systematically when trying to load the affected conversation.

The conversation becomes effectively inaccessible after extensive ImageGen usage.

Frequency

This happens consistently with the affected conversation.

• Reproducibility: 100% on the affected thread
• Occurs after extensive ImageGen usage
• Does not appear to affect normal text-only conversations

Impact

This is a blocking issue because the affected conversation can no longer be accessed.

It also makes long-running workflows involving ImageGen unreliable, since users may lose access to an important thread after investing time into it.

Possible Cause

This may be related to how the app loads conversations containing many ImageGen assets, large image metadata, generated media references, or unresolved image payloads.

The crash may happen during conversation hydration, asset fetching, rendering, caching, or memory allocation.

Workaround

No reliable workaround found.

Starting a new conversation avoids the crash, but the original affected conversation remains inaccessible.

Additional Context

The issue seems specifically tied to conversations with extensive ImageGen usage.

A graceful fallback would be useful, for example:

• Lazy-loading ImageGen assets
• Showing unavailable image placeholders
• Skipping corrupted image blocks
• Loading text first before media assets
• Allowing the user to export or recover the conversation even if media loading fails