Ditto

Copying and pasting are fundamental essentials of computing, but have you ever hit Ctrl+C to copy an item and then accidentally hit Ctrl+C again on some other item and overwritten the original item thus having to go back and recopy it? Who hasn't. Ever had several items to copy from one location to another and had to swap back and forth between applications copying and pasting each one at a time? Again, this is probably familiar to all of us.

Well, the lightweight and highly configurable little app named Ditto provides easy solutions to all these problems along with a wealth of other features that, together, make the Windows Clipboard a relic of the ancient past. In short, if there's a certain capability or capabilities that you've always wished the Windows Clipboard had, Ditto probably does it.

At the core of the application is the ability paste up to ten of the last copies via hotkey. For example, let's say you want to cherry-pick ten isolated sentences out of a large body of text and paste them into a new document. You simply copy each sentence one after another (via Ctrl+C, right-click context menu, etc. just as before) and then swap to your new document and paste each sentence with rapid fire using the hotkeys. That saves you from ten instances of having to copy, swap to new document, paste, swap back to source document, over and over again.

Additionally, triggering Ditto's main hotkey brings up a clipboard window that shows customizable previews of all recent copies and allows pasting simply by arrowing to the copy you want to paste and hitting enter to paste it (or scroll with the mouse and double click to do the same). Not only does this make a great alternative to using the hotkeys to copy and paste batches of data without lots of task swapping, the Ditto clipboard window is also extremely handy if you copied something important in the past -- be it minutes, hours or even days previous (the depth of Ditto's "memory" is customizable in options) -- and wherever you pasted it to is now lost, damaged or otherwise inaccessible, you can just dig into Ditto's clipboard and retrieve it.

Once you get "under the hood" with Ditto you will find that it's highly configurable on top of it's already very useful core features. Key examples include the ability to customize hotkeys (including Win key support) and the ability to define exactly what Ditto handles and how long it keeps track of it. Specifically, you can define how long Ditto retains copies on it's clipboard, the maximum amount of copies to retain, the maximum size of copies to be handled, and what sort of copied data is to be handled (text, rich text, graphics, sound, etc.). Anything not handled by Ditto is simply handled by the Windows Clipboard in the traditional copy/paste manner instead of being added to the queue of contents in Ditto's Clipboard. This is particularly useful for people who copy/paste data that is relatively large in size, e.g. working with high res photography in Photoshop where a single copy/paste may be several megabytes in size. (Ditto can handle this data if you want it to, but you'll find that the database it stores its clipboard in will become extremely bloated the more you dump massive copies into it and it will eventually slow down Ditto's overall responsiveness on an average computer.)

Furthermore, the clipboard is even networkable with other clipboards which can be invaluable in, say, office environments where pooling data is crucial. However, this feature as well as the fact that Ditto can "remember" so much of your data -- perhaps very private data -- may be alarming to some users. Fear not, everything mentioned here (and more) isn't just configurable, it can be completely turned off as well for those who have privacy concerns.

A must have.
I think Windows should come with a clipboard manager built-in because it is so convenient and it helps to avoid the frustration of losing what was in the clipboard.

Nevertheless, Ditto might not be the most beautiful clipboard manager out there, but it is certainly the most convenient and productive one.
Also, it is full of features if you want to tweak everything ;)

ditto's database is not good, deleting takes a long time, and db file becoming bigger and bigger even i delete some records.
Using copyQ now

Functional and reliable clipboard manager. Along with that it's totally free

A few useful tips:

• You can select multiple images at a time in the clipboard history (by pressing ctrl + click) and drag & drop them in an application
• You can select multiple text items at a time as well, and press ctrl + c and paste them with ctrl + v in an application
  This application is a productivity booster as you can go copying things in the clipboard and save them later just selecting the items on the list. I couldn't live without it.

Easy and Handy. Boosts up productivity. Must have for Software Devs.

I’ve tested some clipboard manager and Ditto was the final choice. It’s damn simple (and I wanted simplicity) with a quick view on your clipboard content and a handy shortcut.

It has the two important features needed for this kind of program?: automatic deletion of content (by age or number of entries) and you can exclude programs from the clipboard content (very handy when you use password managers like Keepass).