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How to fix unwanted JPG to TIFF conversion of clipboard

Picture on website: JPG of 223K, copy & paste into iMessage: it has exploded into a TIFF no less than 34.3MEGAbyte in size. Why the very much unwanted format conversion instead of leaving it like it is?


The way around it is to first save it as a JPG and then drag the JPG into iMessage but that represents a massive impact on usability where even Microsoft Windows does it better.


This appears to be a long outstanding problem (I've found posts going back to 2009 about this) but has anyone come up with a solution since?


I have sent Apple feedback, but given that this apparently has been outstanding for well more than a decade I don't have high hopes of a fix any time soon..


Device: Mac mini M1, MacOS Ventura 13.1

Mac mini, macOS 13.1

Posted on Jan 3, 2023 1:27 AM

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Posted on Jan 3, 2023 6:03 AM

2 - the clipboard converts it in something it prefers instead of leaving it well alone

What is well alone?

The thing on screen rendered by a browser is not a file. It is image data. A file is just a wrapper for the data. Copying the displayed image data is not the same as copying the file.

If you want a copy of the image file used to render the on-screen image, you need to download that file, not copy the image displayed from the file.

Now the question becomes why non-Apple browsers get penalised with massive file formats and how that can be fixed.

They get what they ask for, or they get what they have chosen, or they get the default because they didn’t ask.


Each of those use entirely different rendering engines. It could be that they render images as compressed bitmaps while WebKit renders as jpg or png.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 3, 2023 6:03 AM in response to Second MUYB

2 - the clipboard converts it in something it prefers instead of leaving it well alone

What is well alone?

The thing on screen rendered by a browser is not a file. It is image data. A file is just a wrapper for the data. Copying the displayed image data is not the same as copying the file.

If you want a copy of the image file used to render the on-screen image, you need to download that file, not copy the image displayed from the file.

Now the question becomes why non-Apple browsers get penalised with massive file formats and how that can be fixed.

They get what they ask for, or they get what they have chosen, or they get the default because they didn’t ask.


Each of those use entirely different rendering engines. It could be that they render images as compressed bitmaps while WebKit renders as jpg or png.

Jan 3, 2023 5:10 AM in response to Second MUYB

On Ventura 13.1, when I copy an existing JPG image from my Desktop to the Clipboard, the Finder does not reveal the actual image, but only the filename when asked to Show Clipboard. When I use the Clipboard Viewer available in the Apple Developer additional tools, it shows the following entries:



Only the last four entries show image data (not the image) in the adjacent ASCII/hex viewer. It is clear where the Message application is getting its TIFF image data. Each copy from a web browser will write similar and different content to the clipboard based on that browser developer's choices.


Jan 3, 2023 5:36 AM in response to VikingOSX

OK, but now I have three possible sources of trouble when I cope an image from a webpage:


1 - the web browser provides it in that format (God knows why - it's Firefox so I'll need to look in the settings to see if I can find something there)

2 - the clipboard converts it in something it prefers instead of leaving it well alone (which, BTW, would be the expected UI behaviour, forcing an internediate "save" stage is IMHO exceptionally bad, very much non-Apple UX)

3 - Messages demands a certain format which is weird because I use TIFF literally nowhere.


Thus, to address the question of how to leave an image in the format it was picked up as it seems that I now have to talk to at least two parties, so first I checked browsers with the offending JPG image (well, the latest one, it's not a new problem). So, copy image and paste gets me..


Firefox: TIFF

Vivaldi: TIFF

Safari: JPG.


That was an unexpected plot twist. Now the question becomes why non-Apple browsers get penalised with massive file formats and how that can be fixed.

Jan 3, 2023 6:10 AM in response to Barney-15E


The thing on screen rendered by a browser is not a file. It is image data. A file is just a wrapper for the data. Copying the displayed image data is not the same as copying the file.

OK, but that ought to produce the same result on all browsers. Which it doesn't, so now the question is why. Browser provides erroneously or clipboard asks the wrong format, it's going to be one of the two. What is more important is why this changed - I do not recall this being a problem before a few months ago when I started to notice this. Maybe it's something Ventura specific.


Thanks so far for helping me narrowing this down. When this happened the first time I blamed the usual (i.e. me :) ), but there is a delta between browsers..


Anyway, when I find time I'll send this to the FF team as well as update the Apple feedback I already submitted.

Jan 3, 2023 7:13 AM in response to Second MUYB

You are at the mercy of the browser vendors what formats that they choose to place on the clipboard following a copy operation, especially if they rolled their own Pasteboard routines. You cannot change this behavior as it is compiled into the application. Thus, you would need to contact the individual browser development teams…

Jan 3, 2023 7:29 AM in response to Second MUYB

As dialabrain and Barney-15E have already noted, any file you're viewing is no longer a file. It's uncompressed data. You can't display any compressed file format as is. It has to be uncompressed to be viewable.


The clipboard is the same. It can't hold a TIFF, JPEG, PSD, PNG or any other image file format because it's not a file in that state. It's uncompressed data waiting to be either put somewhere, or replaced by the next item you copy to the clipboard.


Firefox and Vivaldi and Safari aren't doing anything to the image (TIFF, TIFF, JPG in your example) since, again, it's not a file you're copying to the clipboard. Only uncompressed image data. Pasting that data into any app that can display an image file is still uncompressed data. Until you actually save the pasted data as a file, it isn't any kind of file format.

How to fix unwanted JPG to TIFF conversion of clipboard

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