Is there a simple method to copy an image from Google Docs to the local clipboard?

Question

Google Docs uses a 'web clipboard' approach for cut and paste that works very well so long as the paste target is another Google doc. However, I don't know how to easily copy an image from the Google web clipboard to my local clipboard so that it can be pasted into a local document.

At this point, I have discovered two kludgey ways to do this:

1. File->Download as a Microsoft Office formatted file, open the file, copy image to clipboard
2. Capture screen area to clipboard with command+control+shift+4

Both have obvious workflow or quality cons. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I continue to have the same problem, my workaround:

Using Chrome:

1. Open the development tools
2. Click on Application
3. Click on Frames -> Top -> Images

Among many icons, this list contains the image embedded in the google doc, go through the list with the arrow down, and the image will appear on the right, this image can be copied with right-click-copy.

Answer 2

Use shift + right click Then you can download the pictures.

Note: You have to double click on the image to select it first.

Answer 3

If you have many files, use File -> Download as -> Web Page (.html zipped)

Then you can unzip on the desktop, and use the files.

Otherwise, press CTRL + A (selects the entire document/page)

Open Microsoft Word (if on Windows/Mac)
Press CTRL + V (or right-click - insert) to paste the clipboard to Word

Right-click the image in Word and choose "Save as Picture"
(requires Office 2013, if you use Powerpoint it works in 2010 as well)

Or as mentioned by warrax, you can use the Chrome Developer Tools (F12, or CTRL + J)

Answer 4

Updated:

1. Open Chrome Developer Tools
2. Select the Sources tab
3. Expand the contents for (no domain)
4. Locate the entries in the list which begin with filesystem:https://docs.google.com.... Clicking on one will display a preview of its contents. This is the form of the url that's used to reference the images in your document.
5. When you find the one you want, right-click it and Open in new tab. In the resulting tab, you can interact with the image in the same way you'd interact with any other image in your browser.

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Previous answer:

Triple-click the image (or Select All) to select it and then you can right-click it and "Copy Image". Then you can paste it wherever you'd like.

EDIT The key is getting the browser's native right-click context menu instead of the Google Docs context menu.

Answer 5

I've been searching for an easy way to do this too. Triple-click doesn't work.

The best method I've come up with is to paste any image from the Google web clipboard into a GMail message and send it to yourself. After that you can drag and drop the image from within the mail message to where ever you please.

Answer 6

As of Chrome Version 52.0.2743.116 m, none of the answers stated work. (I don't know if the plugin works, but I don't want to install more plugins to find out).

What I was able to do was to use the development tools (most if not all modern browsers have this now).

1. Use the select element on page, and select the image you want to copy/download. Do not have the image selected in the Google Doc, otherwise you will select an overlay/container instead of the image.
2. You should see an <image> tag with an attribute with a url. As of this writing, that attribute is named xlink:href, but may change in the future.
3. Copy link and open that link in another tab/window of the same browser. This might be obvious, but... shrug.
4. Right click on the displayed image and select Copy/Save As or whatever.

This should work for all browsers that have development tools.

Answer 7

CLI One-Liner

I wouldn't necessarily call this simple but it is kind of a fun hack. This solution works on Linux and requires xclip, xmllint, and curl. I believe it should work on a Mac also using the pbcopy and pbpaste commands in place of xclip, but I have not tried it.

The idea is to copy from the Google Doc as normal (Ctrl+c or right-click and Copy on the image), and then execute a one-liner CLI command to "fix" the clipboard so that it contains the actual image.

Background

When copying an image from a Google Doc in Chrome, the clipboard contains the following data types:

$ xclip -selection clipboard -o -t TARGETS
TIMESTAMP
TARGETS
SAVE_TARGETS
MULTIPLE
chromium/x-web-custom-data
text/html

On Wayland, use:

wl-paste --list-types

Ok, we've got some HTML in there, and inspecting that, we have an img tag with a source URL. So all we have to do is extract the URL from the HTML, download it via curl, and send that output back to the clipboard!

Solution

Here we go:

curl \
  $(xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html \
    | xmllint --html -xpath "string(//img/@src)" -) -o - \
  | xclip -selection clipboard -target image/png

or on Wayland:

curl \
  $(wl-paste -n -t text/html \
    | xmllint --html -xpath "string(//img/@src)" -) -o - \
  | wl-copy -t image/png

If you use this often, I recommend putting it into a little script or shell function/alias so you can just copy in docs, and then run clipimagefromgdoc or something like that.

Explanation

Breaking that down into parts:

1. The xclip -selection clipboard -o -t text/html (or wl-paste -n -t text/html) command extracts the HTML from the clipboard and writes it to standard output.
2. That HTML output is piped through xmllint --html -xpath "string(/html/body//img/@src)" - in order to extract the URL to standard output, which points to a Google Docs content server.
3. The URL is provided as a parameter to curl, which downloads the content and writes it to standard output.
4. The downloaded image data is piped back into the clipboard as an image/png via xclip -selection clipboard -target image/png or wl-copy -t image/png.

Note here we assume at step 4 that the image is a PNG, which seems to be a fair assumption for images stored in Google Docs. If that assumption does not hold, variations on this theme are of course possible in which we buffer the output of curl to a temporary file, inspect it via file, and then set the clipboard target appropriately, which can all be easily scripted.

Answer 8

This works for me on the current version of FireFox:

1. Double Click -> Image
2. Shift + Right Click
3. Use the Context Menu to Save, Copy, or Open in a new Tab

As a side note, it seems you can't do anything else between steps 1 & 2, so if you do just deselect the image (click off) & do it again, should work.

Answer 9

This drives me crazy. However, I've found a quick solution using your Google Keep app, at least on desktop computer.

Right-click the image in the Doc, select

It'll open up a side-panel for Keep, then paste it to a new "note" (I had to do this twice for it to work, but it's the first time I've tried anyway). You can then right-click the image in the Keep note and select "open image in new tab" (I'm paraphrasing since I'm using Chrome), at which point you can right-click the image in the new tab and copy-paste to wherever.

Even if you've never used Keep, it's excellent, try it out, and this solution should be as easy for you as it was for me. Sure, Docs should just let me copy-paste to anywhere, at least with less steps than this, but I don't know how to get Google to actually be reasonable with this for us.

Answer 10

Works on macOS + Chrome (101.0.4951.41).

1. Hover cursor on top of image.
2. Shift + Right click
3. Copy image from system context menu.

The trick is to NOT highlight the image using the doc selector (no blue outline). If a blue outline appears, Copy image will not appear in the system context menu.

Answer 11

Here is a solution that worked for me, when the intention was to copy a Drawing image from one Google Docs document to another, using the web clipboard feature.

1. Open the drawing: open the document containing the drawing you want to copy.
2. Select the drawing: double-click on the drawing to open the drawing editor, then select the objects you want to copy
3. Copy to Web Clipboard: click Edit on the drawing editor and Copy shape to web clipboard.
4. Open the target document: now open the other document where you want to paste the drawing.
5. Paste from Web Clipboard: click Edit and Paste from web clipboard. Choose the drawing you copied from the previous document.

A similar alternative: https://youtu.be/1j73Et0YDRk?si=hmkvfpVhLoZQ5GKe&t=29

Answer 12

Good solution

• Double click on the image
• Shift + right click -> Open image in new tab
• Go to the newly opened tab
• Right click -> Copy image

Solution that reduces the image quality

• Make sure that the image is not selected (click somewhere else in the document)
• Shift + right click -> Copy image

Answer 13

If you are using Chrome you can install a Google Docs add on and then cut and paste from docs to a desktop application like word - when copying/cutting from the apps document you must use Ctrl C or X. The first time you try and do this in Chrome it should ask if you want to install the add-on.

Answer 14

The triple-click trick is not available any more. To select and copy to Photoshop does not work.

However, to select the image and paste it into a word processor works and from there you can copy and paste the image into Photoshop.

Note that if the image is reduced in size in your Google doc it will keep its original size as you copy paste it into the word processor, but not keep it as you copy-paste it from the word processor to Photoshop. So, you should drag it to a bigger size in the word processor before copy-pasting into Photoshop.

Answer 15

I had this exact same problem - I wanted to copy an image from Google Docs into Photoshop. The two things that made this possible are:

Don't use Chrome. I opened the document in Firefox, thereby disabling some of Chrome's clever/annoying functions.

Log out of Gmail/Google. That disables all the editing functions in Google Docs/Drive, so you're back to the browser's copy/paste commands.

You can then just right-click and copy the image as you would on any other HTML web page. This process should theoretically work on any OS. I did that on a Mac.

Answer 16

One trick is to Print -> Open as PDF for Preview, then double-click on the images in the preview PDF to select and copy.