When reader Artem wrote in with this tip, I was pretty surprised—turns out you can paste images from the clipboard directly into Gmail with Ctrl+V or the context menu… but only in Firefox 4 at the moment. In Google Chrome, it works a little differently.

Update: after doing a little more testing, seems like if you do this in Firefox, this might not make it through to the receiver properly in some or all cases. It does appear to work with Chrome, however.

Copy and Paste in Firefox

Update: This Doesn't Work Right. Skip down to the Chrome section.

If you’re in Firefox, you can take a screenshot with the print screen key, with a third-party utility, or with the built-in Snipping Tool in Windows 7 or Vista. Or you can even right-click an image in any browser and choose “Copy Image”.

Then you can either Ctrl+V or right-click and choose Paste…

And just like that, the image will be in your new email.

Copy and Paste in Google Chrome

In Google Chrome, it works a little differently—you can’t copy an image from the clipboard, but you can copy images within Chrome. Just right-click on any image, choose “Copy image”…

And then you can paste it directly into Gmail.

Hopefully it’ll all work seamlessly between all browsers at some point in the future. At least you can drag and drop images to Gmail from most modern browsers.