14 DAY TRIAL // Google is always working on making its apps feel more like native applications, be it through speed and features, or through functionality you wouldn't normally expect in a web app, like drag and drop.
Gmail already supports a number of drag and drop features and now it's adding another way of getting content to an email quickly, pasting images from the clipboard.
"They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and people certainly like to spice up their emails with images. A while back, Gmail started making this easier by letting you drop images from your desktop right into the compose window," Daniel Cheng, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
"Now, when you’re running the latest version of Google Chrome, you can paste images right from your clipboard too. So if you copy an image from the web or another email, you can paste it right into your message," he added.
It doesn't sound like much, after all, pasting is one of the most basic functionalities of any operating system and browser. Until now, for security reasons mostly, the clipboard was off access for websites, except for basic things like text.
Now, in Google Chrome, Gmail can access the clipboard and retrieve images as well, making it trivial to copy an image from the web or even from another email and insert it in your message.
"This is especially handy for passing around screenshots — you don’t have to save the files any more (I’ve been using Command-Control-Shift-4 on my Mac to save screenshots directly to the clipboard). While this currently only works in Chrome, we hope to enable it on other browsers soon," Google explained.
Since the functionality has to be supported in the browser, this only works in Google Chrome for now. Other browser-makers might start supporting it eventually. But now that Google Chrome supports it, other websites, not necessarily Google's, might start adding this type of functionality as well.