Typing Out What the Broken Page Looks Like? Paste the Screenshot Into Claude Code Instead.

At a glance

• Ctrl+V pastes an image from your clipboard straight into the Claude Code prompt, or Alt+V on Windows and WSL, or Cmd+V in iTerm2.
• Each image lands as an [Image #N] chip at your cursor, so you can tell Claude which screenshot is the bug and which is the design.
• When paste does nothing, drag the file into the window or give Claude its path, and ask for a crop when fine detail matters.

The modal slides under the header on mobile, the button text wraps in a strange place, and a red overlay shows a stack trace you did not write down. So you start typing: "the second card, the one on the left, sort of overlaps the thing below it." Three sentences later Claude has a guess, and it is the wrong card. Claude Code can look at the screen itself, so you only have to hand it the picture.

Why it matters

Layout bugs, error overlays and design mockups are visual, and words lose most of it. Anthropic's own workflow guide says to use images when a text description would be unclear or cumbersome, and to include screenshots of errors, UI designs or diagrams for better context. It also shows prompts like "Here's a screenshot of the error. What's causing it?" and "Generate CSS to match this design mockup."

Our reading: one screenshot replaces the back and forth where Claude edits the wrong element and you describe it again. The docs say you can work with several images in one conversation, so a before and after pair costs you two pastes. Our suggestion: stop describing the screen and paste it.

How to show Claude a screenshot

1. Get the screenshot onto your clipboard. On Windows, Microsoft's support page says Windows logo key + Shift + S opens the Snipping Tool overlay, and Ctrl + C in Snipping Tool copies the snip to the clipboard. On a Mac, Apple's support page says Shift + Command + 4 captures a portion of the screen; Control-click the thumbnail that appears in the corner and choose Save to Clipboard.
2. In Claude Code, put the cursor where the image belongs and press Ctrl+V. Use Alt+V on Windows and WSL, or Cmd+V in iTerm2. On WSL both Ctrl+V and Alt+V are bound, so use Alt+V if your terminal intercepts Ctrl+V. An [Image #1] chip appears at the cursor.
3. No clipboard handy? Drag the image file into the Claude Code window, or type its path in the prompt.
4. Refer to the chips by number. The docs say the chip lets you reference each image by position, so write the prompt around them and Claude knows which picture is which.
5. To check what Claude is looking at, find the [Image #1] reference Claude mentions and Cmd+Click it on a Mac or Ctrl+Click it on Windows and Linux. It opens in your default viewer.

# We have not run these prompts live; they follow the docs' examples.
# Ctrl+V (Alt+V on Windows and WSL, Cmd+V in iTerm2) drops a chip at the cursor
[Image #1] is the login page on mobile today. [Image #2] is the design.
Find the CSS that makes the button wrap and fix it to match the design.

# paste failed? give the path instead
Analyze this screenshot: ./screenshots/login-mobile.png

# lots of detail in one big screenshot
Crop the error banner from ./screenshots/full-page.png with ImageMagick,
then read the crop and tell me what the message says.

Gotchas

• Big screenshots get shrunk. The tools reference says Claude Code resizes and recompresses large images to fit the model's image size limits, so Claude may see a downscaled copy. If it misses small text, ask it to crop the region you care about, for example with ImageMagick through Bash, and then read the crop.
• The paste key depends on your terminal. The docs list Cmd+V for iTerm2 only and Ctrl+V as the default everywhere else except Windows and WSL. We have not tested every Mac terminal, so if Ctrl+V does nothing in yours, rebind it as below or use a path.
• Paste key fighting something else? The action is chat:imagePaste. Run /keybindings to create or open ~/.claude/keybindings.json and bind it to a key your terminal leaves alone. The docs say changes apply without a restart.
• A path is the fallback. When the clipboard lives on a different machine than Claude Code, for example over SSH, save the image where Claude Code can reach it and give the path. That is our reading; the docs do not cover remote clipboards.

Recommended AI prompt

Copy this paragraph into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or whatever AI you use.