You take a screenshot. You mean to paste it somewhere. You get distracted. The next copy overwrites your clipboard, and the screenshot is gone forever.
That kept happening to me — especially on Linux, where there's no built-in "screenshot → file" flow like macOS. So I built imgclip.
What it does
Imgclip is a single-binary CLI that moves images between your clipboard and files. Four modes, one tool:
# Save clipboard image to a file
imgclip -o screenshot.png
# Watch clipboard, auto-save every new image
imgclip --watch
# Watch clipboard, but choose which ones to keep
imgclip --interactive
# Copy an image file back to clipboard (for pasting into Slack, docs, etc.)
imgclip --copy diagram.png
Why not just use...
ShareX / Snipaste? Great GUI tools, but they need a desktop. Imgclip works over SSH, in headless environments, and in shell scripts.
xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o > file.png? That works for one-shot saves, but it's a pain to remember — and it doesn't do watch mode, interactive filtering, or auto-start.
A shell script? I tried. Handling clipboard APIs across Windows, Linux, and macOS gets ugly fast. Imgclip wraps arboard for cross-platform clipboard access and handles the edge cases.
A few things I found useful
Auto-start on login:
imgclip --install
Sets up platform-native auto-start (VBS on Windows, .desktop on Linux, LaunchAgent on macOS). Every screenshot gets saved automatically.
Pipeline-friendly output:
# Get a data URI for HTML embedding
imgclip --data-uri
# Write to temp file and print the path (great for scripts)
imgclip --temp
# Pipe JPEG to another command
imgclip -f jpeg -q 80 | curl -T - https://upload.example.com
Interactive mode for selective capture:
When you're taking lots of screenshots but only want to keep some of them:
$ imgclip --interactive
imgclip: interactive mode — watching clipboard for changes
[s] save [d] discard [q] quit
imgclip: new image (1920x1080) [s]ave [d]iscard [q]uit? s
imgclip: saved ~/Pictures/imgclip/imgclip-1746359722000-1.png
imgclip: new image (800x600) [s]ave [d]iscard [q]uit? d
imgclip: discarded
Install
Download a prebuilt binary from GitHub Releases (6 targets: x86_64 + aarch64 for Windows/Linux/macOS), or build from source:
cargo install --git https://github.com/alexyan0431/imgclip.git
Single binary, no runtime dependencies. Drop it in your PATH and you're done.
Imgclip is MIT-licensed and written in Rust. Feedback and contributions welcome — especially around new output formats, platform-specific quirks, or package manager recipes (Homebrew, scoop, AUR).
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