The clipboard converts JPG data to TIFF

I just had a go 'round with senior apple tech, about an issue I'd expect people to be jumping up and down about, but there's hardly a complaint.

Essentially Apple has verified a clipboard issue in Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, a problem that affects Apple Mail and Pages, and perhaps other applications. I first consciously encountered the issue when using Apple Mail, so I'll describe it in that context.

When I copy a portion of a jpeg (or make a screenshot) it pastes into Apple Mail as a TIFF file. (NOTE :I do this a lot, because I need to quicly send cropped portions of existing images, without cropping, saving, attaching, remembering to remove unneeded saved image from hard drive ...)

Here's an all-Apple scenario:

• Open a JPG in Preview
• Select a portion of the JPG
• Copy
• Paste inline into Apple Mail
• Send the email
• Open the Sent Mail box, and look at the attachment type for the message sent
• RESULT: The attachment is a TIFF file. JPG was copied / TIFF was sent

This is a big problem:

1. the conversion to TIFF needlessly bloats the file size by four to eight times the original size
2. worse, some email clients can't hand TIFFs, and can't display them inline.
3. This clipboard problem seems to pervade Apple software, and is evident in Apple Pages. Somethin's rotten in the OS.

Other vendors handle pastes seemlessly. In mail applications like Entourage and Thunderbird ... ya copy a JPG it pastes a JPG. But Apple claims that the clipboard conversion is normal expected behavior, handled by Quicktime. In reality, it's a total pain, expected or not

I haven't looked into it, but I'd expect that after an image copy the clipboard may have more than one format in it. Consider the text clipboard, which often simultaneously contains: plain text, rich text, HTML, etc. The software receiving the paste should intelligently decide which format to take in on paste. Same should go for images. Even if the clipboard contains only TIFF data after copy/conversion, shouldn't the receiving app be able to request that QuickTime convert the TIFF to JPG on paste? If so, well, Mail could do that! I believe the application is responsible for chosing which format to paste— that's certainly true if there are more than one formats on the image clipboard, or if conversion is offered.

I hope to not have to resort to measures like third party clipboards:

http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2008_03/column2.pdf

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/545464?answerId=2662725022#2662725022

Here are some posts on Apple's forum complaining about this problem:

https://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?resultTypes=&dateRange=all&peopleEnabl ed=true&q=clipboard+jpeg+tiff+convert&containerType=&container=&containerName=&u sername=&rankBy=relevance

After talking with six people at Apple (half who couldn't understand the issue), and after devoting two hours of my time to find a resolution or tenable workaround, I find it discouraging to recieve this responce from an Apple Senior advisor:

It does appear that the clipboard may save images to it as uncompressed TIFF files, instead, you can try opening the image in preview or dragging and dropping to avoid the clipboard. Again, I've come across workarounds like automated scrips and clipboard manager applications but I can't really make any recommendation or suggestions regarding third party apps.

What's the real problem here?

John