Side panel issues
“The side panel won’t open”
Symptom: you click the toolbar icon and nothing happens, or the side panel area on the right of Chrome stays blank.
Likely cause: Chrome version too old. The side panel API requires Chrome 114 or newer; we test against current stable.
Fix: open chrome://settings/help and let Chrome update. Relaunch. Click the icon again.
“I see ‘Open Grok to start’ even though I’m on grok.com”
Symptom: the not-on-Grok modal appears with an Open grok.com/imagine button, even though your URL bar shows grok.com.
Likely cause: you’re on a Grok subpage the extension doesn’t recognise as the imagine surface — for example grok.com/chat/... or a settings page.
Fix: click the modal’s Open grok.com/imagine button. It takes you to grok.com/imagine, which is the page the side panel listens for.
“The panel is stuck on a blank cream screen”
Symptom: side panel opens but never shows the sign-in screen or the main UI — just an empty cream background.
Likely cause: the session check is hanging. This usually happens when an OAuth window from a previous sign-in attempt is still open in the background.
Fix: check your Chrome windows for a small Google sign-in popup. Close it. Reload the side panel by clicking the toolbar icon to close it, then again to reopen.
Sign-in issues
“Sign-in failed. Please try again.”
Generic OAuth failure. Most common causes, in order:
- You closed the popup before completing. Click Sign in with Google again; the popup will reappear.
- Browser blocked the popup. Check Chrome’s address bar for a “Popup blocked” icon; allow popups for the extension.
- Wrong Google account picked. If your free quota lives on a different Google account, sign out and back in with the right one.
“I signed in on another tab but the side panel still asks me to sign in”
Symptom: you went through the welcome-page sign-in flow but the side panel is still showing Sign in with Google.
Fix: the panel does auto-detect new sign-ins via chrome.storage events. If it didn’t pick yours up, close the panel (click toolbar icon) and reopen. Should now show the main UI.
Mid-run failures
“Free quota used up”
The quota-exhausted modal appears mid-batch. Grok Automation prepaid one prompt’s worth of quota, the next prompt couldn’t be paid for, and the queue paused.
Two options:
- Upgrade to Pro — click the modal’s primary button to open the pricing page. After upgrading, click Continue in the side panel to resume the un-run prompts.
- Wait for the daily reset and click Continue later.
The snapshot is preserved across restarts, so you don’t need to keep the panel open.
“Grok rate limit reached”
The Grok rate-limit modal appears. This is Grok’s limit (not ours) — your xAI account has hit its hourly or daily generation cap on grok.com itself.
- Upgrade SuperGrok opens Grok’s own subscription page. After upgrading, return to the side panel and click Continue.
- Got it dismisses the modal. Wait for Grok’s cap to reset (usually an hour) and Continue.
To reduce the chance of hitting this on long batches, raise Delay max in Settings → Queue to 12–20 seconds before starting. The slower pace gives Grok’s rate window time to drain.
“Run finished with errors” — what failed and why
When a batch ends with red badges on some rows, click the prompt row to expand its error message. Common ones:
| Error text starts with… | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
timeout | Grok took longer than the runner waited. Usually a busy hour. | Re-run with Continue; retries usually succeed. |
download failed | Generation succeeded, but the auto-download couldn’t write to disk. | Check your Chrome download settings; maybe a permission prompt is waiting. |
unknown @reference | (Reference to Video) a prompt used @filename that doesn’t match any library image. | Fix the typo and re-run. |
no image attached | (Image to Video / Reference to Video) the library is shorter than the prompts need. | Add more reference images or trim the prompt list. |
skipped: | A prior chain step failed, so this one has nothing to chain from. | Re-run with Continue — the runner will retry the failed step and then re-chain forward. |
Reference image issues
“Auto-match isn’t matching anything”
Symptom: in Image to Image with Auto-attach on, every row shows the unmatched warning chip.
Likely causes, in order:
- Filenames don’t appear in the prompts. Auto-match looks for the filename (minus extension) as a substring of the prompt text.
hero-frontal.pngmatches the prompt"hero frontal..."but not"the hero looks frontal". - Filenames are too generic.
image-1.pngwill match any prompt containing “image” — and probably the wrong one. Rename to something descriptive. - You meant to use manual mode. If you don’t care about per-prompt matching, turn Auto-attach off — every prompt gets the first N images regardless of name.
“Reference to Video says unknown @reference”
You typed @hero in a prompt but the library has no image whose filename (minus extension) is hero. Case is ignored, but hyphens vs. underscores matter — @hero-frontal ≠ hero_frontal.png.
Fix: rename the file in your library (drop it out, rename on disk, drop back in) or fix the @ token in your prompt.
“My uploaded images disappeared after a browser restart”
Symptom: yesterday’s library is empty today.
Reference images are stored in component state (not persisted to chrome.storage) to avoid blowing out the local storage quota with base64 thumbnails. They survive tab restarts but not browser restarts. Re-upload at the start of each session, or keep your library folder on disk handy.
Download issues
“Auto-download is on but no files appear in my folder”
Three things to check, in order:
- Chrome’s download prompt is waiting. Open
chrome://downloads— there might be a “Save As” dialog pending. - The folder name has illegal characters. Forward slashes, colons, leading/trailing spaces. Stick to letters, digits, hyphens.
- You’re checking the wrong folder. Chrome saves into your Downloads root + the subfolder you set. On macOS that’s
~/Downloads/<folder>/; on Windows it’s%USERPROFILE%\Downloads\<folder>\.
“Files are named (1).png, (2).png, etc.”
Symptom: Chrome de-duplicated your filenames with (1), (2) suffixes because two prompts produced files with identical names.
Likely cause: Use the prompt text as the filename is on, and you have duplicate prompts in the batch. Fix the duplicates, or turn the toggle off — sequential names (prefix-001.png) can’t collide.
Performance and pacing
“A 50-prompt batch is taking forever”
Expected. With the default delay of 2–5 s between prompts and ~30 s per Speed-tier image, a 50-image batch takes ~30 minutes wall-clock. Video at 720p doubles that. Plan overnight runs accordingly.
To make it faster (at the risk of rate limits), drop Delay min / Delay max to 1 / 3 in Settings → Queue. If you start getting rate-limited, undo that change immediately and add some buffer (5 / 12 is a safer overnight setting).
“Retries are using up my quota”
If your Settings → Queue → Retries per prompt is set to 4 and your batch has many failing prompts, each one consumes up to 5× the quota you expected. Drop retries to 1 or 2 for cost-sensitive runs.
Still stuck
If none of the above fixes your issue, two things help us help you:
- Click the Logs button in the bottom-right of the side panel footer, then Export logs. This dumps a JSON file with the runner’s recent activity.
- Email the JSON to
[email protected]with a one-line description of what you were doing when it broke. We reply within one business day.