Screenshots, pasteable literally anywhere, including agent terminals. One snip puts the image, the file, and the path on your clipboard at once.
You press Win+Shift+S, snip a screenshot, and switch to your terminal to show it to Claude Code, Codex, or any other coding agent. Nothing pastes. The Windows clipboard holds only an image, and a terminal wants text. So you save the file by hand, find the path, and type it out. Every single time.
A small resident listener watches the clipboard.
When a screenshot lands on it, the bridge saves the image to Pictures\Clips\clip_<timestamp>.png and puts it back on the clipboard in every format at once:
| You paste into | You get |
|---|---|
| A terminal / coding agent | The file path as text (agents read the path and open the image) |
| Word, Google Docs, Paint | The image |
| Slack, Discord, Gmail, Explorer | The file |
Each paste target picks the format it prefers. You never choose, and you never save a file by hand again.
Copies that carry text with them (a snippet from a browser or Word) are left untouched. The bridge only reacts to pure image copies, which is what a screenshot is.
Requires Windows 10/11 and Python 3.9+ with two packages:
pip install pywin32 Pillow
Then clone and register:
git clone https://github.com/RyanCollinsAI/paste-anywhere.git
cd paste-anywhere
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File register_task.ps1
This registers a per-user scheduled task that starts now and at each logon, runs hidden under pythonw.exe, and restarts itself if it crashes.
No admin rights needed.
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File unregister_task.ps1
Your saved clips in Pictures\Clips stay.
Set the PASTE_ANYWHERE_DIR environment variable to change where clips are saved.
The default is Pictures\Clips.
| Variable | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|
PASTE_ANYWHERE_DIR |
Pictures\Clips |
Where clips are saved. |
PASTE_ANYWHERE_MAX_AGE_DAYS |
30 |
Deletes clips older than this many days. The purge runs after a capture, at most once per hour; an idle bridge purges nothing until the next capture. 0 disables. |
PASTE_ANYWHERE_MAX_TOTAL_MB |
2048 |
Deletes the oldest clips once the folder passes this size. Same purge timing as above. 0 disables. |
PASTE_ANYWHERE_MAX_EDGE |
1568 |
Downscales a captured image proportionally if either edge exceeds this many pixels. 0 disables. |
- A hidden window subscribes to
WM_CLIPBOARDUPDATEviaAddClipboardFormatListener. - A clipboard update triggers only when a bitmap is present and no text, file, HTML, or RTF format is - so only real screenshots qualify.
- The image is saved as a PNG, then the clipboard is re-set with
CF_DIB, a registeredPNGformat,CF_HDROP, andCF_UNICODETEXTtogether. - A custom marker format is written first, so the bridge never reprocesses its own write.
- A clipboard sequence-number check aborts the re-set if you copied something else while the bridge was saving, so it never clobbers a newer copy.
- Activity is logged to
state\bridge.lognext to the script.
py smoke_test.py
Runs an end-to-end check against a fresh bridge instance: trigger, file validity, loop prevention, and two negative cases.
Stop the installed task first (Stop-ScheduledTask PasteAnywhere), because the test needs to launch its own instance.
py status.py(add--jsonfor machine-readable output) - reports whether the bridge is running, last capture time, today's capture count, clips folder size, and last error.powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File diagnose.ps1- runs an ordered set of health checks and prints the first failure with its fix, or "all checks pass" plus the status line.powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File update.ps1- pulls the latest code, re-checks dependencies, restarts the task, and prints the new commit hash.
MIT