At a glance
- Every copy lands: text, links, colors and images sit in one pile while the Stack is open.
- Screenshots collect themselves: ⇧⌘4 captures drop straight in, with no folder detour.
- Cards you can rearrange: drag to reorder, preview on hover or right-click, switch between list and grid.
- Drag out one at a time: each drag takes a single item, so you place references as you build.
- A full clipboard manager underneath: unlimited local history, search and transform-on-paste, all offline.
Gathering references
Gather while you browse: open Pinterest, Dribbble, Savee or Instagram and copy whatever catches your eye. An image, a caption, a screenshot of one section. Each one stacks while you keep scrolling.
Arrange before you place: items hold the sequence you collected them in. Drag a card up or down to reorder, and preview any item before it goes on the board.
Copied images get stored properly, rather than sitting in memory until the app quits. Klipto hashes the bytes and writes them to its own file store, so the same image copied twice takes one slot on disk and every thumbnail survives a restart.
An image copied out of Finder is read at the moment you copy it, while the pasteboard still grants access to the file. Wait until later and the sandbox has closed that door. That is why some clipboard managers show you an empty thumbnail after a relaunch.
Dragging out of the Stack
Images arrive as images. Klipto writes a real temporary PNG and hands the receiving app that file. Figma runs on a Chromium engine that ignores lazy clipboard promises, so a real file is what makes the drop land. The same drag works into Finder, for the same reason.
Text arrives as plain text. Drag a text item out and the receiving app gets a clean string. Figma is the exception worth knowing about: dragged text does not become a text layer there. Press ⌘V inside Figma when you want a text layer. That limit belongs to Figma, and no clipboard manager talks it out of it.
Dragging out does not consume. The item stays on the pile until you remove it. The paste queue behaves the other way, where each press consumes one item.
One at a time is the whole point. A bulk drop puts every image in one spot, and you spend minutes pulling them apart.
Compared with a drag-and-drop shelf
Shelf apps such as Dropover and Space Drop give you a floating window you drag files onto. A shelf collects what you drag at it. The Stack collects what you already copied or captured, so there is no target window to aim at and no saving to disk first.
| File shelf | Klipto Stack | |
|---|---|---|
| What it collects | Files you drag onto it | Anything you copy or screenshot |
| Adding an item | Drag a file to the window | Press ⌘C, or take a screenshot |
| Text, links and images together | Partial | Yes, in one pile |
| Screenshots | Auto-capture on some | Added while the Stack is open |
| Also a clipboard manager | No | Yes: history, search, transforms |
Klipto runs on macOS 14 and later, Apple Silicon or Intel, around 11 MB installed, no Electron. It is $19.99 once with updates included, a free tier and a 14-day Pro trial. The clipboard never leaves your Mac.