PasteLight lives in your menu bar and quietly compresses every screenshot you copy. On Claude Opus 4.7, the Max Saver preset cuts your large-screenshot tokens by about 80% — automatically, before you paste.
Modern AI models bill you for image tokens by area — roughly one token per 750 pixels. A full-screen Retina capture is over 5 million pixels, which on Claude Opus 4.7 costs about 5,500 tokens for a single paste.
That cost is the quiet reason you hesitate — cropping tighter, second- guessing whether a screenshot is "worth" pasting, leaving context out. With PasteLight running, the math gets so much smaller that the hesitation goes away. Share the whole screen, every diff, every chart — without doing the math in your head first.
PasteLight resizes and re-encodes each image to the smallest dimensions the model can still read well, then writes the smaller copy straight back to your clipboard. You paste exactly like before — the bill just shrinks.
Anthropic's own Vision docs recommend downsampling high-resolution images on Opus 4.7 to control token costs. PasteLight does that automatically, every time.
Cmd + Shift + 4, or copy any image. Nothing to launch — PasteLight is already watching the clipboard.
WebP encoding, dimensions clamped to the model's vision cap. A ✓ flashes in the menu bar when it's ready.
Cmd + V into Claude, ChatGPT, or anywhere else. Same image, a fraction of the tokens.
PasteLight lives quietly to the right of your menu bar. Hit ⌥⇧⌘V anywhere and the history drops down — click any cell to re-copy it, already compressed.
No window switching. No dock icon. Nothing to launch.
Max Saver (1024 px, WebP) for chat. Balanced (1280 px) as the default. Blogging and Photo for higher-res output. Custom is yours to tune.
⌥⇧⌘V pops the history open from anywhere. Deliberately avoids macOS's own Paste shortcuts.
Up to 50 recent images (30 by default), browsable as a grid or list. Click any cell to re-copy it instantly.
Warm amber on the front, ink on the back. Or stay in Classic and follow macOS appearance.
Quick popover for the keyboard-driven flow, full window with drag-and-drop for longer sessions.
See bytes saved and approximate tokens spared, per image and per day. Useful when you're tuning a preset.
Lightning for warm amber on ink. Classic for the macOS look. Pick one of four presets — Max Saver, Balanced, Blogging, Photo — or dial in your own.
Grid or list view. Show capture time, file size, preset name. Cap the history anywhere from 10 to 50 items. The defaults are good; tune them once and forget.
Below are PasteLight's projections against Claude Opus 4.7 (image cap: 2,576 px on the long edge). The bigger your capture, the bigger the cut.
A note on these numbers
Token counts come from Anthropic's published vision-tokenization formula (image area divided by 750, after the model's long-edge clamp). The annual-savings chart assumes a realistic AI-workflow capture mix — 40% browser windows, 30% full-screen Retina, 20% smaller windows, 10% dialogs — and Anthropic's published Opus 4.7 input price of $5 per million tokens.
Your own savings will vary with what you actually capture, which model you use, and how often. These are projections, not measurements of your account. Small captures (under 400 px on the long edge) are preserved by design, so they save no tokens — only file size shrinks.
WebP with the right dimensions. Uploads finish in a blink — and the file-size cut applies on every model.
Clipboard read locally, processed locally, history stored locally. Nothing ever leaves your machine.
Every preset, every feature, no sign-up. A small one-time Pro tier arrives later for power users.
No accounts, no telemetry, no upsell modals. A direct DMG you can throw into Applications and forget about.
First-time install · 30 seconds
PasteLight is unsigned during the free launch season, so macOS Gatekeeper will block the first launch. Three steps to get through it.
The command above tells macOS “I trust this file” — it removes the quarantine flag Safari attached during download. It changes only PasteLight; nothing else on your Mac. The friction disappears entirely once PasteLight is signed & notarized. More in the FAQ.
When you paste an image into Claude, it bills you for the pixels — roughly one token per 750 pixels of area. A full Retina screenshot is over 5 million pixels, so a single paste can cost thousands of tokens. PasteLight resizes the image to the smallest dimensions the model can still read well, then compresses it.
Nowhere. PasteLight reads the clipboard locally, processes images locally, and stores history locally in ~/Library/Application Support/PasteLight. No analytics, no accounts, no network calls.
PasteLight is free during launch season while it finds an audience. A small one-time Pro tier will arrive later for a few power-user features. Everyone who downloaded it during the free season is grandfathered in — no rug-pull.
Yes. PasteLight watches the clipboard in the background and compresses any image you copy. You can turn auto-replace off in Settings if you'd rather review images before they're swapped.
Token savings are calibrated against Claude's vision model — that's where the math is verified. On Claude Opus 4.7 specifically, the savings are largest because Opus 4.7 raised the image cap to 2,576 px and bills you for more of your pixels. Anthropic's own docs recommend downsampling images on Opus 4.7 to control costs; PasteLight does exactly that. The file-size reduction (~10×) helps anywhere you paste images — ChatGPT, Gemini, Slack, email.
During the free launch season, PasteLight ships without an Apple Developer signature — that's the $99/year certificate that lets Gatekeeper pre-approve apps. The warning is purely about that paperwork being absent; it isn't a sign that anything is wrong with the app itself. To open PasteLight on first launch: 1. Drag PasteLight.app to your Applications folder. 2. In Applications, right-click (or Control-click) PasteLight.app. 3. Choose 'Open' from the menu. 4. macOS will show a slightly different dialog with an 'Open' button — click it. 5. That's it. macOS remembers your approval, so future launches are normal double-click. A fully Apple-signed and notarized build is planned once PasteLight settles into its free launch season.
It isn't damaged. When you download a file from the web, Safari attaches a 'quarantine' flag to it. On Apple Silicon Macs, that flag combined with our missing developer signature gets reported as 'damaged' instead of the usual 'unidentified developer' warning. The Download section above has the fix — one Terminal command: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/PasteLight.app That removes the quarantine flag from PasteLight specifically. It doesn't touch anything else on your Mac. After running it, double-click PasteLight as normal — macOS won't complain again. Apple's own notarization service is the only way to clear quarantine without any user action, and that's gated behind a paid Developer ID (planned). Until then, the one-line above is the cleanest path.
We tried. The DMG used to include an 'Install PasteLight.command' shell script that did exactly what the Terminal command does. But macOS Sequoia (15) and Tahoe (16) tightened Gatekeeper specifically around shell scripts — even after approving the script through System Settings → Privacy & Security, macOS keeps showing a dialog with only a 'Done' button instead of letting the script run. There's no way to route around it without an Apple Developer ID signature. So the honest answer is: until PasteLight is signed and notarized, Terminal is the one path that actually works on every modern macOS version. The command is safe — it only operates on the PasteLight.app you just dropped into Applications.
Planned, but the macOS app is the priority while PasteLight finds its audience. Sign up to the mailing list (coming soon) if you want to be notified when the Windows build lands.