Elective: give Claude a screenshot
An error message, a broken layout, a design mockup — half of what lands on a developer’s desk arrives as pixels. Claude Code reads images, and three input paths cover every case.
01The idea
- 01Drag the image into the Claude Code window.
- 02Copy it and paste with Ctrl+V (Alt+V on Windows and WSL; Cmd+V also works in iTerm2).
- 03Give its path in the prompt — "Look at this image: ./shot.png".
A pasted image shows as an [Image #1] chip in the prompt box; no chip, no image. In remote setups — Codespaces and the like — Claude Code runs in the remote container and the clipboard is not shared, so use files and paths.
The privacy instinct is worth one beat: the image goes to the model with your prompt. Crop out tokens, customer data, and anything you would not paste into a chat with a stranger. Our rule for client work: screenshots of errors, never of open dashboards — crop to the failing thing.
02The walkthrough
- 01Run the thing that fails — your checker, your tests — and screenshot the output.
- 02Paste it (or save it and drag the file in). Confirm the [Image #1] chip appeared.
- 03Ask for the change in terms of what is shown: "This is the checker’s output. Change the summary line so it also says how many files were checked." Approve the edit, rerun, and see the new line.
- 04git diff to see what actually changed. Pixels in, code out — the diff as ever the arbiter. Stash or keep.
03Your turn
The path route: screenshot your test summary, save it into the repo somewhere git ignores, and ask about it by path — "What does each line of this summary mean?" Then one small change based on what the image shows, verified with git diff.