Copy the contents of image and text files to the clipboard with Copy Contents

You’re browsing Explorer and find an image you’d like to paste into another program. You could right-click it, select Copy, but that won’t work: Explorer copies the location of the file to the clipboard, not its contents.

One workaround is to double-click the image, open it in your default viewer, and copy it to the clipboard from there. That gets the job done, but it’s hardly convenient.

Copy Contents offers a simpler alternative which copies the contents of plain text or image files (jpg, pcx, png, bmp, tga, gif and tif) to the clipboard in a single operation, ready for immediate reuse elsewhere.

The program comes with an installer, unusual for something this simple, but we didn’t find any adware or other annoyances. The only problem was its uninstaller didn’t appear in our "Programs and Features" applet, although it can be accessed from the Start Menu, or by manually running Uninst.exe in the Copy Contents folder.

Once it’s set up, all you have to do is right-click your text or image file in Explorer, then select "Copy Contents". The program opens your target, reads its contents and copies them to the clipboard.

This all worked fine for single files, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the program makes no attempt to handle any more. If you select several text files, they won’t be merged: you’ll get the contents of the last one only.

There’s nothing too advanced here, then, but Copy Contents may still save you a little time. Check it out.