Images copied from chat is not copied to clipboard? Not able to paste it in other applications

It is a terrible design.

I will upvote and hope for the best.

Copying images embedded in chat to Outlook 365 seemed to have started working about 2 months or so ago.... (Using Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise). Initially it was only Outlook that seemed to work... But tried just now with Word and OneNote, and both of those seem to be working now as well to paste images, where a couple months ago they did not.... Attempts to select more than a couple paragraphs of text/images at once is still not working, even with the same O365 tenant apps...

Attempts to paste the same items into Wordpad results in just the text being pasted with no image... However, if I copy the paste the text/images into Word first, and then CTRL+A / CTRL+C to select all to clipboard, I can then paste into Wordpad with the image.

As can screenshot images, use Teams in browser to save the images off to disk and then paste into other apps, using "compliance" as the reasoning for why general clipboard copy/paste functionality with Teams is awful does not seem to be fully accurate, especially given several issues with it across apps in the same tenant. It is refreshing to see there have been some improvements, but several years after the product was released, much of it still seems beta quality compared to several prior MS, and other vendor products it is advertised to replace.

This is a major issue for us. We want to copy images out of Teams all the time, but instead of copying the actual image date (like literally every other program ever), instead it creates an img html tag with base64 data and dumps that onto the clipboard instead.

Whilst Word will interpret this monstrosity back into an image, no other programs do (paint.net, etc.)

I cannot understand how the decision was made to copy and html tag to the clipboard instead of an actual image.

I hope this gets fixed soon, currently we just have to take screenshots of images and it's a major annoyance.

So, instead of copying an image as an image, Teams copies an HTML img tag with a pointer to the image.
Some applications can deal with this and some can't.

For us, Word handles the image, but Snag-it and Figma (our 2 most common uses for image sharing) can't translate the encoding.

Example:
The actual tag exceeded the character limit here by 1600 characters but the gist of it is below

<img src="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAABr0AAAOrCAY...
.
.
.
...VmuAAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" alt="image">

I wanted to include images form Teams in an email.

Here was my workaround...

Start teams in a browser (I use chrome)
Drag the image from the chat to a new tab in the browser.
Click on the tab.
Right click and download the image.
Select a save location, file name, and type.

That is a terrible design and this is still a problem. I don't care about your security issues. Copy/paste and the clipboard are common functions and have worked the same way for years. This is inconsistent and stands in the way of productivity.

Still the same in late january 2023. Microsoft, what are you doing ?

I can understand that copy/pasting pictures as HTML strings may be a handy feature for some people working in the web, but for a vast majority of Teams users, when you copy a picture from a chat, you can expect to have a bitmap object in your clipboard, that you can paste anywhere, and it's not the case at this time.

Why not propose users the two possibilities in the contextual menu ? (copy image as a bitmap OR copy image as an HTML string). It should not be that hard to do ?

@Kai Yao This behavior is defective, not by design, and your link is broken. There are numerous similar issues on the Feedback Portal, but it seems that it's completely unmoderated and disregarded. Here's one such issue.

The Windows clipboard can store multiple representations of the same data. I've included multiple examples here.

Copy Image from Chrome:

Select and Copy from Paint.Net:

Right-click --> Copy Image from Teams:

Again, this is a defect, not a feature, and it's ridiculous that you're defending this behavior.

Similar to John Mangan, I needed to grab an image from a Teams chat and send in an email. A screencap (Snipping tool, Snagit, etc) would have degraded the quality.

In my case though, even dragging from Teams into a browser tab would not work. Copying into ANYthing else (even Word) also wasn't working.

Since this was just a one-off instance for me, I ended up just throwing html and body tags around the img object that the clipboard kept taking, saving that to an html file, and then dropping that into a browser, and finally from there I was able to save as a proper png and attach to my email. Sheesh!

I think the truly amazing thing about this is the image copy appears to be asynchronous and quite slow. Sometimes it seems like you can't copy from teams to paste into teams 👏

Well, at least we got a bunch of useless video effects for meetings in the last release. It's helpful to understand Microsoft's priorities.

What you're seeing is a data URL, MS has converted the image into a text string. This img tag should render in anything that renders HTML. It's also very easy to convert. It should not be our responsibly, and most likely was untested in QA phases because MS doesn't often consider visual concepts like image and information design to be very important.

Since MS expects us to do this kind of stuff ourselves to be functional here's the tool you need to be able to see the images. Good luck: https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image

Please add another context menu item, "Copy proper image, not that other broken one"
and make it do what this site does: https://base64.guru/tools/data-url-to-image
Copying the image shouldn't be this PITAful, that requires jumping through the hoops.
Current behavior is broken, period.

MS prides itself on “efficiency” and yet basic visual communication is wildly difficult. I work for a 60,000 person agency who’s product is literally visual communication. Nobody seems to understand why we are so inefficient except anyone struggling to function in the anti-design infrastructure of Teams.

This is a MASSIVE bug. This is not by design, or simply put, the design is wrong! This means that "copy image" actually does not, in fact, copy the image.

i'm fighting with the same stupid issue (bad approach!), the only workaroud i know is to click on the image and press the small arrow to download this file to the local drive.

but now i have lots of files like

"MicrosoftTeams-image (39).png"

in my download folder.

It also does not copy images from and to Microsoft Outlook.

I also noticed a strange behavior that if I drag the mouse and select a part of the conversation with pictures then I can paste the result into microsoft word and it works, if I use ctr+A and then paste it into word I get grey areas with some emoji's multiplied.

May I ask what the "compliance reasons" are, per message by Kael Yao?

My company uses a few different collaboration tools, which means I often need to get images from Teams to someplace else.

Here is a list of workflows that I need to work, but don't:

• Teams --> Aha! (❌ doesn't work)
• Teams --> Confluence (❌ doesn't work)
• Teams --> Jira (❌ doesn't work)
• Teams --> MS Paint (❌ doesn't work) - Yes, that's right Windows Paint DOESN'T work!!!
• Teams --> Azure DevOps (✅ works)
• Teams --> Word (✅ works)

Now, if I use Word as an intermediary then this works:

• Word --> Aha! (✅ works)
• Word --> Confluence (✅ works)
• Word --> Jira (✅ works)
• Word --> MS Paint (✅ works)

Obviously, saving the file to my hard disk works as well.

Note that this doesnt't work in either of (I've tested both):

• The old Teams classic
• The new Teams NEW

And, to be absolutely clear, I'm using Microsoft Edge as a browser.

I am currently using version 1.7.00.6058 (64-bit) version of MS Teams and can confirm the behavior of right-click "Copy image" in MS Teams and then pasting directly into MS Paint does not work.

It appears the issues is that the "Copy image" gets you a base64 encoded image; something that looks like this:

<img src="data:image/png;base64,<your_base64_string_here>" alt="image" iscopyblocked="false">

So it's either that MS Teams isn't copying the raw image correctly, or that MS Paint hasn't been updated to handle base64 string image being pasted into it (e.g. MS Word knows how to handle this).