# Pasting screenshots into Claude Code over SSH

> Source: <https://thebiglog.com/posts/send-agent-harness-screenshots-via-ssh>
> Published: 2026-09-29 21:00:00+00:00

I should soon be done with kicking Claude out of my personal MacBook to a local box. One of the first things I missed is the ability to paste screenshots with ``` `⌃`` V` ```: the remote terminal doesn’t know about my clipboard.

I wanted my solution to look like this:

For the transport part, turns out Samuel Lawrentz had a similar need and published a CLI tool called [clipssh](https://github.com/samuellawrentz/clipssh): basically a Bash script that writes the image to a temporary file and copies it to the remote host. I didn’t want to install this with a package manager, so I just stuck the [main script](https://github.com/samuellawrentz/clipssh/blob/main/clipssh) in `.local/bin`.

The second part is a shortcut in the Shortcuts app that comes into play after I’d already captured the screenshot: Shottr is now the frontmost app and pressing # expand the path so pngpaste (a dependency of clipssh) is there
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
export CLIPSSH_HOST="username@100.113.x.x"
export CLIPSSH_REMOTE_DIR="/tmp/claude-image-clipboard"
sleep 0.3
# dismiss Shottr (auto copies the screenshot to my local clipboard)
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to key code 53' 
sleep 0.3
clipssh
```

One thing left. 1Password kept prompting me to approve the SSH connection each time I invoked this, so I made the connection persist for 4 hours in `~/.ssh/config`:

```
Host 100.113.x.x
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/cm-%C
  ControlPersist 4h
```