Rate limiting

Only /summarize is rate limited. Everything else — homepage, /models, /health, detail view, delete — runs unthrottled.

This is intentional: the summarize endpoint is the only one that does expensive outbound work (caption fetch plus an LLM call), so that's where abuse protection matters.

Default

30 per hour

Overriding the limit

Set RATE_LIMIT_SUMMARIZE in .env:

RATE_LIMIT_SUMMARIZE=60 per hour

Any Flask-Limiter expression works, including compound rules joined with ;:

RATE_LIMIT_SUMMARIZE=5 per minute;100 per day

Disabling limits in development

Rate limiting is skipped automatically whenever any of these are set:

• DEBUG=True
• FLASK_ENV=development
• LOCAL=true

The Docker image leaves these unset, so production traffic is throttled by RATE_LIMIT_SUMMARIZE. Local python run.py sessions pick up .env and are typically unthrottled.

Gunicorn worker note

When running under Gunicorn (the Docker default), Flask-Limiter uses in-memory storage per worker. With 2 workers, each worker maintains its own counter, so in practice the effective cap across the process group is 2 × RATE_LIMIT_SUMMARIZE. For a self-hosted app this is almost always fine. If you need strict shared-counter limits, point storage_uri at Redis.