One of Chrome's most powerful and convenient features is its ability to sync data like bookmarks, passwords, and browser extensions across multiple devices. Chrome's usefulness got a boost when it began integrating a native clipboard sharing capability aptly called Shared Clipboard back in September.  In its nascent state, the feature was only capable of sharing plain text, including URLs, between devices. Now, further updates to the Chromium Gerrit have revealed the inclusion of image sharing in future versions of Chrome.

Chrome Story spotted the code change request in the Chromium Gerrit, and it comes with a succinct description: "Add image support to Remote Copy."

Clicking on the three bugs associated with this feature reveals more information about how image sharing is expected to work. For instance, when you click on bug issue 1018138 titled "[Shared Clipboard] Image support for the first integration," you're presented with the following outline from the Chrome developers:

Exact details TBD but the general shape of this is:

* Add image url to message proto

* When received, verify this is a valid and trustworthy source

* Fetch the image in a utility process

* Write the image to the clipboard

* Show a notification to the user

Issue 1018132 says:

Add a feature flag for receiving and handling an image payload.

Finally, issue 1020582 mentions that image sharing via the Shared Clipboard feature likely won't be integrated in time for Chrome version 80 (Chrome stable is currently on 78.0.3904.70).

Although many extensions already exist that allow users to share text and pictures among devices, sharing everything you type and view with third-party entities comes with inherent security risks. It's great to see Google working on a native built-in solution, provided that it can adequately protect our privacy and data.

Source: Chrome Story, Chromium Gerrit