Not just a tasty treat but a versatile clipboard image manager. Frustrated with the awkward way you need to past graphic clipboard content in an image editor before you can share it as a file made me write Pastry.

Pastry copies a graphic in the clipboard to a file and pastes the reference to that file all with one keystroke. It will make sharing uploading and publishing images a lot easier.

Download the installer for version 1.6  here   (570Kb)

 

More about Pastry 

Pastry introduces two new keyboard shortcuts:

CTRL ALT V and CTRL SHIFT V. These shortcuts are a variation on the regular Paste command (CTRL V).

Pastry keeps track of clipboard activity. Every time you copy a graphic to the clipboard Pastry will know about it and is stand by to archive the clipboard content to a file and return you a link to that file.

This means that image publishing just got a whole lot easier. In order to publish a local image you can just copy the image in your image viewer or the name of the image file. As soon as you press the new special hot keys CTRL AL V or CTRL SHIF V Pastry will archive the graphic to a file and paste the reference to that file in the control that currently has focus.

CTRL ALT V

This hotkey will save the graphic currently stored in your clipboard to a file and then paste a reference to that file into the current textbox. Uploading images to Google will be so much easier. Capture the image, and upload the image in the file upload dialog. Just press CTRL ALT V to paste the filename into the dialog.

CTRL SHIFT V

This hotkey does the same but this time instead of a file reference it will paste a URL to the file. This allows you to share the image via the Internet. (Provided you have a local Web server)

Features

  • Archives graphic clipboard contents to a file instantly
  • Full file drag and drop support allows you to drag clipboard content as if it is a file
  • Instantly publish graphics on your local web-server and paste a link to it with CTRL SHIFT V
  • Paste a file link of your graphic in file upload dialogs. Great for web based content management
  • Copy graphic content of a file to clipboard when you copy a file in File explorer
  • Intuitively resize graphics and share them
  • Browse your clip board history

What you can do with it 

  • Archive all graphics that ever pass through your clipboard. Browse your clip history and instantly pickup old clips and re-use them.
  • Quick sharing of screenshots via instant messaging programs By dragging the snapshot in Pastry onto IM text boxes such as in Skype
  • Resize big 10 Mega pixel photos to a more manageable size and drop them into an email client as attachment
  • Upload graphics and screenshots instantly. Copy the graphic, open the upload dialog and CTRL ALT V the file name link to the screenshot file and away you go.
  • Enable the ability to copy graphics content of graphics files when you select "Copy" on the file name. This allows you to quickly pick up a graphic clip without having to open the graphics file in an editor.
  • Publish your clipboard contents instantly to your local web-server and past a URL to the image by pressing CTRL SHIFT V
  • Reduce, increase or stretch graphics intuitively by resizing a window. Copy as viewed and your new resized graphic is ready to be shared.

So how does it work.

Let's say you want to use part of an image that is loaded in Microsoft Paint. You select the rectangle and select "Copy" from the Edit menu.

Pastry notices the fact you just copied a graphic to the clipboard and is standby to store this graphic to a file as soon as you press one of the two new hotkeys.

Pastry will fade into view whenever a graphic is copied to the clipboard. The Pastry window will fade out again when it is ignored.

 

 

 

 

 You open a web-page editor such as the Google pages editor and select insert image which allows you to upload a file to your web-site.

 The moment you press CTRL ALT V  Pastry will store the graphic on the clipboard to a file and paste the file link to that file.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All that is left to do is to select the uploaded file in the above dialog and you are done.

 





Normally Pastry runs almost invisible in the windows system tray but a double click on the pastry icon will bring up the user interface. It will show the last four images you have used.

Clicking on any of the images will place that image into the clipboard ready to be pasted into an image editor or press CTRL ALT V to paste a file reference to that image in a textbox.

Pastry can keep a full history that can be viewed when you click on the "<<More" link. The user interface will expand and show you the complete list of files handled by Pastry.














Again click on any image to copy it to the clipboard ready to paste the image or a reference to the image.

Drag and drop

You can select any of the images in the above window and drag them onto targets capable to receive dropped files. This means you can drag and drop the images to another folder for a copy action, drop them onto an email window to create an attachment or drop the graphic onto an instant messaging text window in order to send the file.

Copy files

Microsoft dropped the ball again when they did their File Explorer in Windows. You can view your images as thumb nails and in XP even as a filmstrip but you can not copy the actual image content without loading the image into a viewer first.  tsk tsk tsk.

With Pastry you can select Copy on an image file in File explorer. This which will cause Pastry to load the image into the clipboard for you. There are some limitations. 

  • You can only copy one file at a time. (How else will we know which file reference to paste?)
  • Copied files are only archived when you CTRL ALT V or CTRL SHIFT V  the reference to the file otherwise we end up making copies of files you already have.

Image sizing 

 Often your original image is too large to share. Especially those Multi megabyte 10 Megapixel photos. Good if you want to print them but for screen viewing they can be much smaller.

Pastry does a very intuitive image resizing. You can copy the image file and then copy it again inside the Pastry GUI like this:

Note how the original image 2592 x 1944 pixels. Right click on the main image and select "Copy as viewed to save another version of the image at the size viewed in Pastry.

If you like your image larger then just resize the Pastry window before you "Copy as Viewed"

 

 

 

 Configuration

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 Pastry has plenty of configuration options to make the program work just right.

Location
Is used to specify where the image files are stored. If you have a local web-server then one of it's public folder may be a good place. Otherwise the My Pictures folder is a good place.

Root URL
If you wish to make your images accessible via your local web-server then you can provide a Internet path (URL) to your image file here.

Base name
Every image stored to a file needs a name. This name is made up of the base name with a sequence number added to it. For example "pie0001.jpg"

Sequence Number
This keeps track of the number used for the file name. You can choose if you want to restart counting every time you run Pastry which will cause old images to be overwritten or you can keep the counter go forever but be aware you could build up quite a library of images this way.

File Size
Images can be stored either as uncompressed BMP files. These files are large but are lossless and maintain the original image quality. However, if this is not an issue then you can choose to use JPG files in various file sizes. Larger files tend to be of a better quality. The default Medium provides a good balance between file size and image quality.

Keep Images generated Previously
As mentioned earlier you can choose to overwrite images stored in previous session of Pastry or you can choose to keep all images indefinitely.

Archive every image copied
This one is pretty cool. Normally images in the clipboard are only stored to a file when you press the hot keys CTRL ALT V or CTRL SHIF V. But, if you check this box then every time Pasty senses a image copy then it will automatically store the image in the clipboard to a file. This give you a nice repository of images and clips while you are working with graphics.

Start Pastry every time Windows starts 

Often you will wish Pastry was running when you copied that graphics clip. Since I tend to run this program all the time I though it would be handy to have it start automatically when Windows is started. Of course that is entirely optional.

Change log  

1.6 (13 May 2008) 

Removed the window that appears on the taskbar when Pastry appears.  There was also a bug that causes screen captured to be resized using a the nearest sampler which produces a poor reduced image quality.  This is now fixed.

1.5 (12 May 2008)

A quick fix on the main window positioning. On my wide screen monitors the window might have been visible but on anything less the program may not even be seen. Now the window will align itself with the right edge of your main screen.  Not a terribly exiting update but one that makes a big difference if you could not see the program before.

More interesting is the fact that I now move a tiny version of the bitmap in the clipboard to the tray icon. You are supposed to drag the icon and drop it as a file but that doesn't work  (yet)

Also I reckon Pastry is useful enough to have it running most of the time. Therefore you have the option to automatically start Pastry every time you start up windows. You can turn it off and on on the config tab.

Improved the hiding and showing of the user interface. Not quite perfect yet but more usable. Also changed the way the vairous GUI elements resize. So wit all that this program is starting to be pretty solid so I no longer label the program Beta anymore. You could say that it is therefore released.

1.4 (11 May 2008)

To facilitate easy transfer of an image in the clipboard to Skype I have added the file drag & drop behaviour to Pastry. You can now Select any image in the Pastry window and drag it any window that you can drop files into. This can be your pen drive folder, an email editor (Drop as attachment) or even the text window in most IM programs such as MSN or Skype.  (Of course in MSN you can already simply Paste a graphic straight into the chat window which will generate a temp bitmap that is send across. very clever)

Pastry now fades into view when a graphic is copied to the clipboard. If you ignore it it will just fade out again without interrupting your work flow.

Pastry now will show which image is selected by showing a light gray border.

1.3 (10 May 2008)

"Could not open Clipboard"  Error:  Finally a solution for copying segments from Paint dot net. Until now you would regularly get the error "Could not open Clipboard" when you'd copy a segment from Paint dot net. This was due to the fact that Paint Dot Net is a bit slow closing its clipboard object when you do a copy. Now Pastry will keep trying for 2 seconds before it gives up.

Image Scaling feature: Now you can open the main image viewer and specify if you want to view the image 1:1, scaled or stretched. The cool part is that you can visually size the image and then "Copy as Viewed" which will create a smaller version of the 10 mega pixel photo!

1.2 (4 May 2008)

Copied segments from MS Paint would look distorted. This is now fixed.

 1.1 (Quite a while ago)

Never kept a log so I have no idea. Who cares, get 1.3 or later. :-)

Future plans

There is plenty of scope for this little program. I would like to add FTP upload, add specific Google API's to integrate better with Google pages and also a resizable screen capture rectangle that can be used to quickly pick up pieces of a window.