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, at each logon, at each unlock, and each time the machine wakes from sleep.
It runs hidden under pythonw.exe and restarts itself if it crashes.
A start while the bridge is already running does nothing.
No admin rights needed.
If you installed an older version, run register_task.ps1 again to get the unlock and wake triggers.
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. |
PASTE_ANYWHERE_MIRROR |
unset | An scp destination, for example mybox:Pictures/Clips/. Each clip is also copied there. Unset disables. |
If you snip on a laptop but your coding agent runs on a remote machine over SSH, the pasted path points at a file the agent cannot see.
Set PASTE_ANYWHERE_MIRROR to the same clips folder on the remote machine, then restart the task.
When both machines use the same user name, the pasted path is valid on both.
The copy runs in the background after the clipboard is ready, so a paste is never delayed; the file lands on the remote machine a second or two later.
It needs key-based SSH (no password prompt), and a failed copy is logged to state\bridge.log.
- 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