Migrate from Azure Vision - Image Analysis

The Azure Vision - Image Analysis API will be retired on September 25, 2028. After that date, calls to the service fail. Azure supports all existing Image Analysis customers until the retirement date. To ensure business continuity and minimize disruption, start planning your migration to alternative solutions that best meet your scenario requirements. This article provides comprehensive guidance for evaluating, selecting, and transitioning to new services.

Migration preparation checklist

1. Assess current usage and dependencies on Image Analysis API.
2. Identify business scenarios and technical requirements for your image analysis scenarios.
3. Evaluate alternative solutions based on capabilities, integration, cost, and support.
4. Plan model migration steps.
5. Test new solutions in a staging environment.
6. Update production workflows and retrain stakeholders.

Alternative options based on scenario needs

Consider these alternative platforms and services depending on your specific use case, technical requirements, and integration needs. The following options are recommended for each set of features under Image Analysis.

For OCR and Read capabilities, try Document Intelligence

Azure Document Intelligence provides support for OCR text in images.

• Features: Azure Document Intelligence is a cloud-based Azure AI service that you can use to build intelligent document processing solutions.
• Learn more about Document Intelligence:
  • What is Azure Document Intelligence?
  • Document Intelligence Read model

Image embeddings scenarios

SigLIP (Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre training)

• Best for: Customers who need strong zero shot classification and image text retrieval abilities.
• Features: A CLIP‐style vision‐language model from Google that replaces the standard contrastive (softmax) loss with a pairwise sigmoid loss. It trains on large scale image text pairs.
• Learn more about SigLIP:
  • Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training
  • SigLP on Hugging Face

Next steps and required actions

• Make a plan to transition away from Azure Computer Vision - Image Analysis by September 25, 2026.
• Azure Computer Vision - Image Analysis will be retired on September 25, 2028. Transition to alternative options by that date.