Edit Clipboard images in an external image editor

(This feature is available with QCE v3.0.9.8 and more recent)

When the QCE window contains an image from the Clipboard or from the Clipboard history, you can easily edit it with your preferred image editor. All you need to do, after configuring your external image editor (as shown below) is to:

  1. Load an image in the Quick Clipboard Editor window:
    • copy an image in the Clipboard and make sure the editor window is Synced (hit Cancel if necessary);
    • or retrieve an image from the QCE Clipboard history.
  2. In the QCE window, click the image and, in the menu, select Edit image in an external editor.
  3. In your image editor, edit your image (crop it, for example) and copy the changed image to the Clipboard (generally by hitting Ctrl+C).
  4. Return to the QCE window and see (after maybe one or two seconds) the edited image saved to the Clipboard history and ready to be pasted in its final destination.

Configuring your external image editor

Most image editors can be launched from the command line with a file to load as parameter. If you don’t have an image editor, I recommend JPEGView (a lean, fast and highly configurable image viewer/editor with a minimal user interface). I’ll use this application in the following example. To install it, extract from the ZIP file the folder for your system (JPEGView32 or JPEGView64) and save it in the folder of your choice. In this example, we use the 32-bit build.

To configure the external image editor, open the Options, Various dialog box. The Application path in our example could be C:\MyApps\JPEGView32\JPEGView.exe. The Image editor parameter is the information added to the command line to load a specific file when you launch the application. With JPEGView, the parameter to enter is simply the path and name of the file (this is the case for most application) enclosed in double quotes in case the path includes spaces.

In most cases, you can simply keep the default value proposed in the Options dialog box "%pathfile%" (including the double quotes). QCE will replace %pathfile% with the path to the temporary file created to save the image in QCE. Some applications may require a different parameter, for example --"%pathfile%" or /load:"%pathfile%". Refer to the documentation of your application. You can add other parameters if required. For example, with JPEGView, you could ask to open the image on your second monitor with the parameter "%filepath%" /monitor 2.

Editing the image and copy it to the Clipboard

To continue with our example using JPEGView, if you want to crop the image, drag the zone to crop and in the menu, select Crop Selection.

Then save the cropped image to the Clipboard with the command Copy to Clipboard (Ctrl+C). You will see the cropped image appear in the QCE window ready to be pasted and added to the Clipboard history.