On a new Ubuntu laptop (26.04, GNOME on Wayland), pasting a screenshot into Claude Code with Ctrl+V did nothing at all. No error, no hint, just nothing. For the first week I assumed image paste wasn't supported on Linux and kept dragging files in from the Screenshots folder instead.
Turns out Claude Code has no clipboard code of its own on Linux. When you paste, it shells out: it tries xclip first and falls back to wl-paste. My install had neither, so the detection step exits non-zero and the paste silently no-ops.
The fix
On Wayland:
sudo apt install wl-clipboard
On an X11 session, install xclip instead (it's the one checked first). No need to restart a running Claude Code session either: the binary lookup happens at paste time, so it just starts working.
I've only verified this on Ubuntu, but nothing about the mechanism is Ubuntu specific, and the package is named wl-clipboard on Fedora and Arch too.
Two footnotes: on Wayland don't bother installing xclip as well, Claude Code would prefer it and route through the XWayland bridge for no gain. And xclipboard (already in /usr/bin on many systems) is an unrelated X11 clipboard manager, not a substitute.
What hid it
Two things made this look like a missing feature rather than a missing package:
Ctrl+Shift+V is your terminal's paste, not Claude Code's. In Ptyxis (and GNOME Terminal, and most others) Ctrl+Shift+V is the terminal's own paste and can only ever send text down the pty, so it will never carry an image however the clipboard is configured. The key that actually reaches Claude Code's image paste is plain Ctrl+V. (On Windows and WSL the same action is Alt+V, so a binding quoted from elsewhere may not be the one that applies to you.)
Drag-and-drop works through a completely different path. Dropping a file onto the terminal inserts its path as text, and Claude Code separately matches pasted text against /\.(png|jpe?g|gif|webp)$/i and reads the file straight off disk, no external tool involved. That's why one route worked all along while the other silently didn't.
Diagnosing it
These are the two commands Claude Code actually runs on Wayland, so if the first one works in your shell, Ctrl+V should work in Claude Code:
wl-paste -l | grep -E "image/(png|jpeg|jpg|gif|webp|bmp)" # detect
wl-paste --type image/png > /tmp/screenshot.png # fetch