Image paste fails with 'no image on clipboard' despite screenshot copy

What happened?

Pasting a screenshot/image into Codex repeatedly failed. The UI reported that no image was available on the clipboard, even though the user was attempting to paste a screenshot for debugging.

Observed error, repeated several times:

Failed to paste image: no image on clipboard: The clipboard contents were not available in the requested format or the clipboard is empty.

This blocked a normal debugging flow where the user needed to share a screenshot of Google Play Console.

Expected behavior

Codex should accept a copied screenshot/image from the clipboard, or provide a clearer fallback path when the clipboard content cannot be read.

At minimum, the error should distinguish between:

• the OS clipboard actually being empty
• the clipboard containing an image in an unsupported format
• the Codex client failing to access the clipboard image
• WSL/Windows clipboard interop limitations

Environment

• Codex CLI: codex-cli 0.142.2
• OS/session: WSL2 on Windows
• Kernel: Linux BigFatty 6.18.33.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jun 5 01:12:21 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• Workspace path: /mnt/d/repos/fountainrank

Additional context

As a workaround, I tried to pull the image from the Windows clipboard through WSL with PowerShell, but Windows executable interop was not working in this session:

/bin/bash: line 1: /mnt/c/Windows/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/powershell.exe: cannot execute binary file: Exec format error

That workaround failure is separate, but it made the missing image-paste support more disruptive because there was no usable in-chat path to attach the screenshot.

Repro steps

1. Copy a screenshot/image to the clipboard.
2. Attempt to paste it into Codex chat.
3. Observe the paste failure:

Failed to paste image: no image on clipboard: The clipboard contents were not available in the requested format or the clipboard is empty.