export to clipboard

[bart9h]

please add a "Clipboard" as a target storage option to the export module.

should be easy possible to implement, and would be useful when exporting a single image to share or post somewhere.

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[dterrahe]

should be easy to implement

What is this judgement based on? My (intentionally) limited understanding of clipboard functionality is that it can be complicated to support in a portable way. Usually for large data, like images, an application will notify the clipboard that data is available, but then has to keep it around until it is actually requested. So there is a "buffering" requirement that we don't have elsewhere. Then an image format that is supported by the "pasting" application needs to be made available. We could try to support just one greatest common denominator, but that might lose image quality, or a high quality one, but then some simple applications might not be able to accept it. So likely we'll need to support a range of formats.

Not saying this is not doable, but calling it trivial is not necessarily the best way to invite somebody to spend a significant amount of time learning about this stuff and then testing and bug fixing. Especially because those bugs will come from users who are likely to blame dt rather than some random 3rd party app they've been using for years without any problems.

[bart9h]

I understand your points, this can get complicated.

We could limit to that common denominator, at a lower resolution.
If a large high-quality image is desirable, than the user should export to a file instead.

Maybe label the clipboard export option clearly to avoid confusion: on the "target" list it could be named "Clipboard (low res)" or something like that, and disable some other export settings (format, size, etc).

[dterrahe]

It would not necessarily be a "low res" version (you could still specify the resolution in the export dialog); it would maybe (I don't know; haven't looked into whether a common denominator exists and what limitations it would have) be a not properly color managed version, or even have to have very low bit-depth. It might be so bad (but in unpredictable ways) that nobody would bother using it.

We could limit to that common denominator

Somebody who'd be willing to spend the time on this could definitely do that. You'd have to find a volunteer. And telling them this will be easy is not necessarily the best way to do that.

[bart9h]

ok, I take that back :)

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[owenjm]

Unsure why this hasn't been added already, but it really is trivial to implement as a lua script (under *nix, at least):

darktable = require "darktable"

darktable.preferences.register("clipboard_export","clip_options",
  "string","Clipboard command options",
  "Options for the clipboard CLI tool","-selection clipboard -t image/jpeg -i")

darktable.preferences.register("clipboard_export","clip_app",
  "string","Clipboard application",
  "CLI tool to copy images to the clipboard","xclip")
  
darktable.register_storage("clipboad_export","clipboard",
  function( storage, image, format, filename,
     number, total, high_quality, extra_data)
    darktable.control.execute(darktable.preferences.read("clipboard_export",
         "clip_app","string").." "..darktable.preferences.read("clipboard_export",
         "clip_options","string").." "..filename)
    darktable.print_toast("Image copied to clipboard")
end)

If you're using Wayland rather than X11, you'll need to set a different clipboard application, and likely different options for that command: you can do this under Preferences -> lua options.

Note that the above script has no error or sanity checking for the preference options, so if it doesn't work, check the command name and options (and look for an error message on the CLI). It also doesn't delete the tmp file after creation at present.

(I'm also a little puzzled as to why this isn't a native function of darktable, since GTK provides simple, native clipboard handling (and the toolkit takes care of everything downstream -- unlike as suggested by the poster above, dt would not have to handle image data after the clipboard set event). It seems a fairly useful option to provide? But thankfully the lua scripting extensibility makes it easy to work around.)

[dterrahe]

I'm also a little puzzled as to why this isn't a native function of darktable

This isn't a complicated puzzle. It takes somebody with knowledge in this particular area, like apparently yourself, to pick this up and implement it. I'm sometimes a little puzzled by the need to explain how free software works.

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