Claude Image View shows thumbnails of pasted images in Claude Code, instead of bare [Image #1] tags

Pasting a screenshot into Claude Code puts a tag like [Image #1] in the prompt box but no picture, so the terminal shows the text and the image goes to the model unseen. Claude Image View, an MIT-licensed Claude Code mod published on 2 October 2026 by Jarrod Watts, draws thumbnails of every pasted image in a row above the prompt as soon as the paste happens.

The repository is at github.com/jarrodwatts/claude-image-view and has 104 stars and 7 forks per the GitHub API on 4 October 2026. It installs through the Claude Code plugin marketplace, requires Claude Code v2.1.287 or later for mod support, and runs on macOS and Linux terminals that implement the kitty graphics protocol, such as Ghostty and kitty itself.

What a user sees change

With the mod installed, pasting one or more images into the prompt puts a row of thumbnails in the band above the input, labelled with the number of each tag. Wide screenshots stay wide, phone shots stay tall, and the tiles shrink to fit the line above the prompt so the row never scrolls. Once the message is sent or the tags are deleted, the row clears.

Jarrod Watts' README explains why this matters: a prompt that says "why is the header misaligned here [Image #1] vs [Image #2]" asks the model to look at two specific pictures, and nothing before this mod told the person at the keyboard which picture is which. A mislabelled tag quietly sends the wrong screenshot to Claude.

How it works, from the author

The README says Claude Code saves every pasted image to a cache folder for the session, at <tmp>/<project>/<session>/images/<n>.png, and inserts the [Image #n] tag into the prompt. The mod polls the prompt box every 200 milliseconds for those tags, because pasting an image does not raise an edit event in the terminal. For each tag found, it reads the picture's size from the first bytes of the PNG header and draws the thumbnail using Claude Code's Image element, which hands the file path to the terminal to render.

Jarrod says the mod makes no network requests and writes no files, and that the image data never passes through the mod itself. The terminal reads each PNG and draws it. claude plugin validate on the repository prints every event the mod hooks and every call it makes.

Where the pitch stops

Terminals without the kitty graphics protocol fall back to drawing [Image #n] text in each tile, so the row shows where a picture would sit without actually drawing one. The Claude Desktop app already previews pasted images, so the mod draws nothing there. The author points out one more constraint: background sessions turn terminal images off by default, so a user attaching from Ghostty or kitty needs to set CLAUDE_CODE_FORCE_TERMINAL_IMAGES=1 in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json to get thumbnails back.

A hundred stars in two days from a plugin that solves one annoyance is modest traction, and the mod depends on an undocumented path inside Claude Code's own temp folder, so a release of Claude Code that moves pasted images somewhere else will stop the thumbnails until the mod catches up.

Source

• Claude Image View GitHub repository, primary source: https://github.com/jarrodwatts/claude-image-view
• Claude Code mods documentation referenced by the README: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins/mods/overview
• GitHub REST API for star and commit information, queried 4 October 2026: https://api.github.com/repos/jarrodwatts/claude-image-view