How to copy an image to the clipboard from a file using command line?

Question

I'd like to write a script to take an image file, scale it 50% and put it on the clipboard so it can be pasted easily. The bit I'm stuck on is how to place an image on the clipboard.

I know of xclip, but AFAICS that only deals with text. Is it possible to have an image on the clipboard without the application that generated it sitting around? - Sorry I'm not sure of the internals of how the clipboard works!

EDIT

Thanks to Florian's answer below I was able to achieve what I wanted, which was to take a screenshot and automatically scale it to a max of 600px wide (e.g. for pasting into an email). The further problem I faced was that Thunderbird won't accept image/png from the clipboard. I got round this by converting it to text/html with a data url. Here's my code in case anyone finds it useful:

#!/bin/bash
TMP=/tmp/screenshot.png
function screenshotfail {
  notify-send -u low -i image "Screenshot failed."
  exit
}
# Take screenshot
gnome-screenshot -a -b -p -f "$TMP" || screenshotfail
# Ensure it's max 600px wide
mogrify -resize '>600x' "$TMP" || screenshotfail
# optimise the png if optipng is installed.
which optipng >/dev/null && optipng "$TMP"

# Copy to clipboard.
#
# This is what does not work for Thunderbird:
#   xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png <"$TMP" || screenshotfail
# But this does:
echo "<img src='data:image/png;base64,"$(base64 -w0 "$TMP")"' />" | \
  xclip -selection clipboard -t text/html || screenshotfail

# Remove the temp file.
rm -f "$TMP"

# Notify user.
notify-send -u low -i image "600px screenshot copied to clipboard"

Seems a duplicate of: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30093/copy-image-from-command-line-to-clipboard — Champ, Oct 12 '18 at 14:57
Feel free to post an answer post to your own question, so the community can upvote the answer, and so your answer doesn't get prioritised over other answers that the community may prefer — Flimm, Feb 05 '24 at 17:36

score 65 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 20 '16 at 20:00

65

Use the -t option to specify the content type, like

xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -i example.png

answered Apr 20 '16 at 20:00

Florian Diesch

89,821

-t doesn't work on on my xclip version 0.12 – Irfan Nov 07 '16 at 05:59
@Power-Inside: Works for me with xclip 0.12 on 16.10 – Florian Diesch Nov 07 '16 at 11:18
3

to get this to work on 17.10 I had to do this: xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o > example.png – Anake May 03 '18 at 08:48
Works with xclip version 0.12 on my Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS – Champ Oct 12 '18 at 15:50
1

Works only for GTK environments like Gnome, not for Qt environments like KDE/plasma or LXQT. – noraj Jan 07 '19 at 13:08
pbcopy < beauty.png works for terminal on macOS – DawnSong Jul 15 '19 at 03:49
@noraj Works in my Kubuntu 19.10 (installed on Ubuntu 19.10). – Cees Timmerman Feb 03 '20 at 14:46
Thanks. I added fswebcam to take a photo from webcam and copy directly to clipboard: fswebcam -d /dev/video1 -r 1920x1080 - | xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png – Mario Mey Sep 25 '21 at 15:57

How to copy an image to the clipboard from a file using command line?

EDIT

1 Answers1