Powerful emacs hacks: paste images to markdown from clipboard

Jun 19, 2025

Why do I love emacs? Let me show you.

Problem

I want to add images to my blog.
I write them in markdown in emacs
I often take screenshots on mac which saves it to clipboard (or want to paste images from my clipboard manager)
I want to paste those screenshots into a specific directory based on the file I am editing
If I am editing my-new-blog-post.md I want the images to be saved from clipboard -> ../media/my-new-blog-post-1.png, ../media/my-new-blog-post-2.png and so on.

✨ The Emacs Magic

I need to spend no time messing around with plugins, or extensions, or fancy editors, or shortcuts, or automations.

I go straight to my trusted emacs lisp code, and hack something up with the help of llm’s:

(defun genox/screenshot-from-clipboard ()
  "Save clipboard image to a uniquely named file in ../media/
relative to current file, and insert a markdown image link."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((basename (file-name-base (buffer-file-name)))
         (media-dir (expand-file-name "../media/" (file-name-directory (buffer-file-name))))
         (counter 1)
         filename)

    ;; Ensure media directory exists
    (unless (file-exists-p media-dir)
      (make-directory media-dir t))

    ;; Find a unique filename
    (setq filename (expand-file-name (format "%s-%d.png" basename counter) media-dir))
    (while (file-exists-p filename)
      (setq counter (1+ counter))
      (setq filename (expand-file-name (format "%s-%d.png" basename counter) media-dir)))

    ;; Save clipboard image using pngpaste
    (if (eq system-type 'darwin)
        (call-process "pngpaste" nil nil nil filename)
      (error "Clipboard image capture only supported on macOS with pngpaste"))

    ;; Insert markdown image link
    ;; Insert markdown image link with path starting from /media/
    (when (file-exists-p filename)
      (insert (format "![](/media/%s)" (file-name-nondirectory filename))))

    (markdown-display-inline-images)
    (newline)))

Save the above function in my init.el emacs configuration file. Evaluate it. Switch to my markdown buffer. Hit M-x genox/screenshot-from-clipboard and it saves the image and pastes this:

![](/media/my-new-blog-post-1.png)

which then auto expands to an inline image using markdown-display-inline-images. Magic within minutes!! No messing around with Obsidian plugins, or creating custom extensions. Code -> eval -> test -> [blog]? -> move on.

See my previous blog post on how I get emacs to understand where to find /media/my-new-blog-post-1.png relative to my file.