Getting images from the AppKit pasteboard

Jun 3, 2022 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon swift pasteboard multi-platform uikit appkit

In this post, we’ll take a look at how to fetch images from the AppKit NSPasteboard, which behaves a bit differently than the UIKit UIPasteboard.

Unlike UIPasteboard, NSPasteboard has no convenient way to fetch images. Instead, you use readObjects(forClasses:) and cast the result to an NSImage array.

You can make NSPasteboard behave more like UIPasteboard by adding these properties:

import AppKit

extension NSPasteboard {

    var image: ImageRepresentable? {
        images?.first
    }
    
    var images: [ImageRepresentable]? {
        readObjects(forClasses: [NSImage.self]) as? [NSImage]
    }
}

This lets you use images to get all images in the pasteboard, and image to fetch the first. If the pasteboard doesn’t contain any images, these properties will return nil.

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