diff --git a/src/lib/video/pipeline.ts b/src/lib/video/pipeline.ts
index cf11cfab..d6f78acb 100644
--- a/src/lib/video/pipeline.ts
+++ b/src/lib/video/pipeline.ts
@@ -35,6 +35,24 @@ export interface VideoProgress {
 
 export type ProgressReporter = (update: VideoProgress) => Promise<void> | void;
 
+const ALLOWED_IMAGE_TYPES = ["image/jpeg", "image/png", "image/gif", "image/webp", "image/bmp", "image/svg+xml", "image/tiff"];
+
+async function validateImageUrl(url: string): Promise<void> {
+  try {
+    const response = await axios.head(url, { timeout: 5000 });
+    const contentType = String(response.headers["content-type"] || "").toLowerCase();
+
+    if (!ALLOWED_IMAGE_TYPES.some(type => contentType.includes(type))) {
+      throw new Error(`Invalid file type: ${contentType || "unknown"}. Only image files are allowed.`);
+    }
+  } catch (error) {
+    if (error instanceof Error && error.message.startsWith("Invalid file type")) {
+      throw error;
+    }
+    throw new Error("Failed to validate image file: unable to fetch file headers");
+  }
+}
+
 export async function cleanupVideoArtifacts(tempDir: string, outputLocation: string): Promise<void> {
   await Promise.all([
     fs.promises.unlink(outputLocation).catch(() => {}),
@@ -109,6 +127,7 @@ export async function runVideoPipeline(
   // 1. OCR if an image is provided and no text content was supplied.
   if (imageUrl && !content) {
     await onProgress({ progress: 10, step: "Reading image (OCR)…" });
+    await validateImageUrl(imageUrl);
     const {
       data: { text },
     } = await Tesseract.recognize(imageUrl, "eng");