[Feature Request] Allow passing image file paths as strings instead of embedding images
Status Open
Reported on v2.0.76
Maintainer reply None cached
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in thread ↓
Activity 16 comments · opened Dec 28, 2025
Bug Description
It's annoying that when pasting the image path - it gets replaced by the actual image! I
actually want to give claude the image PATH . My current workaround is to paste the path somewhere else, remove the "g" in jpg, copy again and paste it in claude-code, then add the "g" again. If there is some other way to do this - it should be more obvious.
Environment Info
- Platform: darwin
- Terminal: webstorm
- Version: 2.0.76
- Feedback ID: 20ca8db9-1516-4581-a907-806b19660169
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15 Comments
Found 3 possible duplicate issues:
This issue will be automatically closed as a duplicate in 3 days.
🤖 Generated with Claude Code
It is a dupe but the original issue https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/12328 is locked and it recommends creating a new one.
Please - while I may be one of the few complaining about it - this is probably a silent pain for thousands, if not billions, of Claude-addicts like me. Claude isn't able to extract the path or raw image data from the pasted image, so if you're like "hey can you use this image in the website", it's like, "nope, sorry, gimme the path".
Below is an example of one such annoying interaction - where I finally got the image paths in by copying them into something else - removing the "g" in jpeg" and then re-adding it after pasting.
<img width="960" height="586" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/8903fec6-ff3a-483b-a295-d7317bf5d0d7" />
This issue has been inactive for 30 days. If the issue is still occurring, please comment to let us know. Otherwise, this issue will be automatically closed in 30 days for housekeeping purposes.
Yep it's still happening. Still gives be trouble about 5 times/day on average. Come on this is a 1 line fix, Claude could do it in like 10s.
I'm having trouble too. Sometimes the path is more important than the image itself, so I'd like to see this fixed.
All we need is a setting that makes it possible to disable this.
I need to do like over 30 image paths manually and this is annoying as hell to work with. Can someone from the team launch an agent and get this fixed in 5 mins?
+1. Pasting/copying images into terminal embeds them instead of preserving the file path. Videos already appear as paths — images should have the same option. A setting to toggle this would solve it. Still hitting this daily.
Any update on this? This is one of the features that hasn't been fully thought through. A simple toggle to disable auto-embedding would go a long way.
When I try to paste a path to a larger file (e.g. a 6-7 MB GIF), the auto-embedding completely freezes my Claude Code session and I have to restart it. This makes it genuinely unusable for certain workflows, and I hit this issue on a daily basis.
My current workaround is to paste the path elsewhere, remove a character from the extension, paste it into Claude, and then re-add the missing character, which puts me off all the time.
Would love to see a toggle to prevent this from happening.
Really needed!
Needed!
(+1 vote)
On a mac, command+shift+c copies the path instead of the image. In Claude code, could we use command+shift+v to paste the path instead of the image itself? This is still a very frustrating issue in 2026.
This has become a big workflow issue for me as well. I regularly copy paths from the Finder and expect Cmd-V to paste the paths as text, not image references. If I wanted an image reference I'd either drag the images in or copy the image and paste with Ctrl-V. Now I have to first paste the paths into a TextEdit document, change the path slightly so it doesn't really resolve, paste, and then change the path again so it's correct. That's a lot of wasted time.
Lookling like we might be getting superintelligence before we get the ability to paste image paths into claude code.