Copy image from clipboard to file

Question

Is it possible to take an image from the clipboard and output it to a file (using X)?

I can do this with text easily:

$ xclip -selection c -o > file.text

But when I try the above with an image nothing is written.

The reason I want to do this is I don't have an image editor installed, and it got me thinking whether I could do this without installing one.

score 112 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 22 '20 at 06:21

112

You can actually do this with xclip using -t option.

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t TARGETS -o
TARGETS
image/png
text/html

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o > /tmp/clipboard.png

Refer to the ICCCM Section 2.6.2 for further reading.

Note: xclip SVN revision 81 (from April 2010) or patches later required.

edited Nov 22 '20 at 06:21

Semnodime

answered Jul 17 '14 at 16:11

derobert

I am using 0.12, the one that is offered by pacman so I shall have to get the upstream version. Thanks! – Lerp Jul 21 '14 at 08:23
1

Error: target image/png not available this be old. Debian stretch – Stígandr Nov 14 '16 at 15:45
@Stígandr I confirmed this still works on my machine running Debian testing (stretch). Maybe you copied a JPEG or some other type of image? Probably best to ask a new question rather than debug it in comments. – derobert Nov 14 '16 at 16:21
On my machine, i needed to specify -selection primary instead. – phil294 Feb 16 '20 at 18:02
1

@phil294 that's the other X clipboard, the two used ones are primary and clipboard (there are others, but nothing uses them). Primary is normally select and middle-click, clipboard is normally copy/paste – derobert Feb 16 '20 at 18:38
Can I test the results of target? i.e is my image type available – zzapper Dec 01 '20 at 16:33
1

@zzapper it spits out the types available, so you can test it by piping to grep for example. – derobert Dec 01 '20 at 21:48

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 22 '18 at 16:33

3

xclip doesn't work with images on my computer (svn84-4) :

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o
Error: target image/png not available

But there is another program which take screenshot and paste it into a file, very simply : scrot :

scrot /tmp/myImage.png

answered Feb 22 '18 at 16:33

Gérard

5

It appears 'scrot' takes screenshot of my GNOME Terminal instead of taking it from clipboard. 'man' pages appears to be indicating no flag for this – MD. Mohiuddin Ahmed Sep 15 '20 at 09:12

2 Answers2