Paste pictures from the clipboard into the message field

Feature Proposal
1

Currently it is not possible to copy and paste a picture from the clipboard into the chat when using the desktop app (tested this on linux and windows with version 1.2).
I would like to use this feature to send screenshots to my colleges.

Expected behavior

Copy and pasting from the clipboard with either the GUI (e.g. right click into the message field in a delta chat 1:1 or group conversion should display the option paste) or with ctrl+v should place the picture into the message field so that you can add some text and then send it (basically just like when using drag and drop currently with a picture that resides on your filesystem, I find it strange that that feature is already present)

Actual behavior

Using ctrl+v after ctrl+c does nothing, there is also no GUI option “paste” displayed when right clicking into the message field.

The signal desktop app for example does provide this feature for pictures (but not for other files). So maybe we can look at their implementation ?

4 Likes
2

hello @elovin, welcome to the forum!!!
good proposal, this is useful to avoid having to create temporal files that you have to delete manually then :+1:

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3

Hello guys!

I like DeltaChat.

But I would like to give you a suggestion:

It would be really nice, if you could paste pictures / screenshots into the Desktop client directly.
This is not possible at the moment.

Would be great feature.

Thank you for your attention! :slight_smile:

Kind regards from Germany / Palatinate
Antoine

1 Like
4

I started working on this and gave up for today, some notes:

paste in multiple images from libreoffice

  • Deltachat supports only one attachment per message currently, but we could show the drag in multiple files dialog and send out multiple messages
  • I can’t get a good list of files/content from electron in this case, it just gives me RTF or html, but maybe it can be extracted from there, but that’s complicated.

paste in mixed content (images and text from libreoffice)

  • same problems as with multiple images
  • also deltachat does not support mixed content so the text would all go into the message text and the attachments are separated.

Paste in one image from libreoffice

  • That should be possible with electron only thing that might be hard is saving it to disk first, because the backend/core wants the attachment as path to its file and not as binary memory data.

Paste in files from file manager (tested on linux)

  • electron doesn’t detect that it is a file and pastes in the path to the file as text, libreoffice on the other-hand pastes it in as file or image.

I haven’t looked at signals code yet, maybe there are solutions to these problems in there…

5

this is an issue with core, it should be possible to add files from binary memory data giving a filename, with bots this was an issue, the bot have to waste time with lots of IO operations (and it doesn’t feels ok to save the memory blob to a temporary file, then load it again to memory to save it again to a file in the blobs dir)

1 Like
6

this would be absolutely brilliant. i think right now, it slows me down to have to drag and drop an image from my windows 10 file explorer into the desktop app… if i could just copy / paste that’d be sick!

it’s real easy to take a snip or capture a region using a desktop app like ShareX and being able to take that clipboard image into the email world would be radical.

i hope this feature somehow makes it’s way into the desktop app :crossed_fingers: :crossed_fingers: :crossed_fingers:

7

There’s been a lot of progress on this topic recently here:

2 Likes