clipboard-image

clipboard-image

Get and set images on the macOS clipboard

Install

npm install clipboard-image

Usage

import {
	writeClipboardImages,
	readClipboardImages
} from 'clipboard-image';

await writeClipboardImages(['screenshot.png', 'photo.jpg']);

console.log(await readClipboardImages());
//=> ['/var/folders/.../clipboard-image-1.png', '/var/folders/.../clipboard-image-2.png']

API

hasClipboardImages()

Check if there are images on the clipboard.

Returns a Promise<boolean>.

On non-macOS platforms, it returns false.

readClipboardImages()

Read images from the clipboard.

You get PNG files no matter what image types they were on the clipboard to make it easier to handle.

Returns a Promise<string[]> with paths to the saved PNG files. You are in charge of these files. You can move them somewhere else or clean them up when you are done.

On non-macOS platforms, it returns an empty array.

writeClipboardImages(filePaths)

Write images to the clipboard.

Supports any image type that macOS supports, which includes PNG, JPEG, HEIC, WebP, GIF.

On non-macOS platforms, it does nothing.

filePaths

Type: Array<string | URL>

An array of file paths and file URL objects pointing to image files.

CLI

# Read images from clipboard and output file paths
clipboard-image

# Write images to clipboard
clipboard-image image1.png image2.jpg

When reading from clipboard, if there are images, they will be saved to a temporary directory and the file paths will be printed (one per line).

When writing to clipboard, provide one or more image file paths as arguments.

Related

• clipboardy - Access text on the system clipboard (copy/paste)
• copy-text-to-clipboard - Copy text to the clipboard in the browser