Paste Images

A WordPress plugin that lets you paste images straight into the media uploader instead of saving them to disk first.

It adds a "paste an image" option right next to the existing Select Files button, wherever WordPress's media uploader appears.

Why

Typical use cases:

• Taking a screenshot and pasting it directly (Ctrl+V / Cmd+V) instead of saving it to disk first.
• Choosing "Copy image" on an image in a web browser, then pasting it in.
• Copying an image file from your local file system and pasting it in.

Where it works

• The standalone Media > Add New screen (media-new.php).
• Any wp.media() modal — the post/page editor's "Add Media", the featured image picker, galleries, and any other plugin's own media picker (it doesn't need to know about this plugin).

A pasted image is uploaded through WordPress's normal upload pipeline, so it becomes a completely ordinary attachment: thumbnails, metadata, and (inside a modal) the same "switch to Media Library and select it" behavior you get from a normal browse-upload.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.3+
• PHP 7.0+

Installation

1. Copy the paste-images folder into wp-content/plugins/.
2. Activate Paste Images on the Plugins screen.
3. Open any media uploader and paste an image.

Once installed, updates are automatic: WordPress checks GitHub releases at alancameronwills/paste-images and offers the update on the Plugins screen like any other plugin — see Releasing below.

Development

This is a small plugin — plain PHP and vanilla JS, no build step or package manager for the plugin itself. It vendors one third-party library, Plugin Update Checker (plugin-update-checker/), to power GitHub-based auto-updates.

• paste-images.php — enqueues the assets, handles the upload via AJAX, and wires up the update checker.
• assets/paste-images.js — detects the uploader UI, shows the paste hint, and handles the paste event.
• assets/paste-images.css — minor styling for the hint/feedback text.

Lint the PHP with a PHP CLI, e.g.:

php -l paste-images.php

There's no automated test suite; changes are verified by hand in a browser, since the interesting logic is DOM/JavaScript integration with WordPress's media modal rather than pure PHP.

See CLAUDE.md for a deeper look at the internals (the two different uploader markups WordPress ships, and how uploads are integrated back into the Backbone media frame).

Releasing

Version numbers live in two places that must be bumped together: the Version: header in paste-images.php's docblock and the PASTE_IMAGES_VERSION constant just below it (the constant drives cache-busting for the enqueued assets).

After bumping the version, committing, and pushing to main:

.\release.ps1

This builds build/paste-images-<version>.zip (via build-release.ps1), tags v<version>, pushes the tag, and creates a GitHub release with the zip attached using gh. The update checker is configured to read release assets, not just tags, so the zip must be attached — a bare tag/release with no asset won't be picked up.

Sites on a shared/busy host may hit GitHub's unauthenticated API rate limit (60 requests/hour per IP) and see puc-github-http-error notices. Fix by adding a personal access token (no scopes needed for a public repo) to that site's wp-config.php:

define( 'PASTE_IMAGES_GITHUB_TOKEN', '...' );

License

GPL-2.0-or-later