I often draft content for posting into Discourse in Google Docs. (Not simple messages, obviously, but more formal announcements and the like, where collaborative editing is essential.) Until Monday, I could select all in a Google Doc and paste into Discourse and get semantic text formatting (other than bold and italic character styles) and images. The images came over because Google Docs put them on the macOS clipboard as URLs, and Discourse was happy to ingest them. However, Google very recently changed things so copying from Google Docs seemingly encodes the images as Base64 instead. (I’m basing this guess on MailChimp’s tool for ingesting formatted text, which used to work fine when there were URLs but started kicking out the Base64 images on Monday.) Regardless of what’s actually happening behind the scenes, copying and pasting from Google Docs no longer brings over images, just the formatted text. Images are replaced with [image]. Obviously, it’s possible to paste an image from the macOS clipboard into a Discourse composer window, so my question is if there’s any way for Discourse to accept a combination of text and images all at once, which is much easier than having to paste text in and then insert images one at a time. I did some testing with copying text and images from various Mac apps to see if they put data on the clipboard differently, but nothing worked—I either got [image] or nothing, apart from one time when I got a little [Arc 2023-05-03 at 15.28.15@2x] tag. Is there any information about what sort of data Discourse can accept from the macOS clipboard and in what combinations?

Hello Adam :wave: [image] Adam C. Engst: so my question is if there’s any way for Discourse to accept a combination of text and images all at once If you’re specifically talking about Google Docs, it’s not possible to our knowledge since their change: [image] Issue on posting: Can't copy images from Google Docs Support Hey Ayelen! I’ve seen this recently as well and unfortunately you won’t be able to copy/paste images from a Google Doc into your community. It looks to be a security feature that Google has implemented. Zapier has an article that dives into this a bit. You should still be able to copy/paste from other sources like Pages, Microsoft Word, Pinterest, etc. I don’t know if it would be possible for Discourse to be able to paste Base64 images as regular images in a post. That could be worth a post on #feature I guess. As a practical example, if we have a Google Doc (Test Discourse base64 image - Google Docs) and we copy all of it, here’s the Windows 11 clipboard content according to Clipview (Windows clipboard raw viewer) Version:0.9 StartHTML:0000000105 EndHTML:0000001659 StartFragment:0000000141 EndFragment:0000001623 test img

Thanks—I’ll reply over there about Pages and Word, which don’t work either for pasting text and images. My question for this topic is what clipboard contents Discourse can accept? It seems to be able to do images on their own and HTML code as long as the images are linked and not embedded. Do you know of a Mac equivalent to Clipview so I could investigate what different apps are putting on the clipboard?

[image] Adam C. Engst: Do you know of a Mac equivalent to Clipview so I could investigate what different apps are putting on the clipboard? I’m trying Clipboard Viewer for Mac OS X and it seems to do the job. Here with my google doc content copy: [image]

Alternatively, you have this handy website: Clipboard Inspector Explore the content of your clipboard

Best way to paste styled text and images into Discourse composer

Product Support

Arkshine May 5, 2023, 5:57pm 6

Alternatively, you have this handy website:

Topic		Replies	Views
Issue on posting: Can't copy images from Google Docs Product Support uploads	3	11339	May 5, 2023
Support for pasting rich text with inline images from Google Docs / Word / Pages Feature composer	2	211	October 7, 2025
Copy-pasting Discourse images content outside Discourse Product Support	3	917	September 20, 2022
Copy and paste image link without formatting Product Support	11	15276	November 7, 2024
HTML/RTF pasting Feature	74	14515	March 9, 2020

Best way to paste styled text and images into Discourse composer

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