You want to paste a screenshot into an SSH session
The window is right there in front of you. You copied the image with the Windows Snipping Tool a second ago. But you're inside a remote shell, and Ctrl+V just prints a garbled sequence of control codes — because a terminal has no idea what a bitmap is.
This isn't a bug. Terminals were built for text. Your clipboard has an image on it, and there is no shared filesystem between your laptop and the box you're SSH'd into for the image to land in. You're going to have to put it there first, and then tell the remote command where you put it.
Most people work around this. All of the common ways work. All of them interrupt what you were doing.
The workarounds you've probably tried
scp in a second terminal
Save the clipboard to a PNG. Open a second terminal. Type scp screenshot.png user@host:/tmp/. Wait for the transfer. Switch back to the first terminal. Type /tmp/screenshot.png. Try to remember whether you saved it as Screenshot 2026-08-20 143201.png with spaces, or something sane. It works. It costs you a context switch and about thirty seconds every time.
Paste as base64
Copy the image, base64-encode it locally, then echo <huge blob> | base64 -d > /tmp/img.png on the remote. Faster in principle. In practice you're staring at a wall of encoded text that scrolls past your prompt for half a minute, and any typo in the shell mangling breaks the whole file silently.
A shared network folder or synced drive
Mount a Samba share, or drop the file into a synced folder that both machines can see. Fine for a home lab, awkward for anything with a firewall between you and the remote, and now you have a new dependency to think about (is the mount still there? did the token expire? is the SMB port even open?).
VS Code Remote SSH
Opens a proper remote workspace, and you can paste an image into the editor pane — but the terminal pane still can't accept an image, and the whole thing costs you an IDE where you might have wanted a plain shell.
What you actually want
You want Ctrl+V to do the sensible thing. Save the image over the wire. Land the absolute path at your cursor. Let you press Enter.
Ctrl-V Terminal is a tabbed SSH client for Windows that does exactly that. When your clipboard holds an image and you press Ctrl+V in a session, it writes the file to a directory of your choice over SFTP and pastes the remote path — nothing else. No dialog, no extra steps, no context switch.
Why the small detail matters
Because the path lands as plain text at your cursor, whatever command you were about to run just works. That includes tools that read images from the filesystem:
claude "look at $(pwd)/screenshot.png"— hand a screenshot to Claude Code running on the remote, and it opens the image directly.codex "explain this diagram"— same story for Codex.tesseract screenshot.png out— OCR without downloading twice.convert screenshot.png -resize 50% smaller.png— ImageMagick pipeline without a detour.
These workflows are the reason the feature exists. If you're pair-programming with an AI over SSH, the round-trip of "grab a screenshot on my Windows box, get it onto the Linux box, hand the path to Claude" happens dozens of times an hour. Turning it into one keystroke isn't cosmetic — it changes how you use the shell.
Try it
Ctrl-V Terminal is a free download for Windows. Everything on this page — image paste, tabbed sessions, SFTP, VNC — works from the first launch, no license needed. Paid plans unlock unlimited saved sessions and team licensing, but the paste-image workflow is free.