claude-image-view

Claude Image View

A Claude Code mod that shows the images you paste, so you see thumbnails above your prompt instead of bare [Image #1] tags.

Install

Inside Claude Code, run:

That's it. Paste an image into the prompt and its thumbnail appears above the input.

Prefer the terminal?

Then run /reload-plugins inside a session, or start a new one.

What You See

Paste one or more images and a row of thumbnails sits above the prompt, each labelled with the number of its tag:

- Thumbnails appear as soon as you paste. You don't have to type another key first.
- Thumbnails keep their shape. Wide screenshots stay wide and phone shots stay tall.
- Always fits on screen. Tiles shrink to fit the space above the prompt, so the row never scrolls or gets cut off. If there are too many, the row ends with +N for the rest.
- Clears on send. Once the prompt is sent (or the tags are deleted), the row goes away.

How It Works

Claude Code saves every pasted image to a cache folder for the session, as ///images/. in the format it was pasted (.png, .webp, .jpg, ...), and puts an [Image #n] tag in the prompt. Claude Image View is a mod:

1. Every 200ms it reads the prompt box and looks for [Image #n] tags. It checks on a timer because pasting an image doesn't raise an edit event.
2. For each tag it finds the cached file. Kitty graphics only draws PNG from a file, so on macOS anything else (WebP, JPEG, HEIC, GIF, TIFF) is converted once with sips to /image-view-.png. It reads the size from the PNG header.
3. It draws the thumbnails in the band above the prompt. Where Claude Code draws pictures (see Terminal Support) it uses Claude Code's Image element, and the terminal reads the file itself, so the image data never passes through the mod.
4. Anywhere else it decodes the PNG itself,…