Idea: A Better Copy and Paste Function

Computer software and techniques evolve. From the keyboard-only interface to the mouse over to touch or voice commands is just one example. From mainframes and thin-clients to workstations, to home computers to cloud services is another one. Many parts have changed over the year. But one thing that hasn’t is your clipboard. That is the part of your computer you use if you copy something (a text, an image) from somewhere (Word, your hard drive) and paste it somewhere else (into a form, to another folder).
But this clipboard is “dumb”. Every time you copy something new, the old data is overwritten. This might be useful. But imagine the following scenario:

• You have a folder with 200 photos of your list paragliding trip
• You want to send 20 photos to your friend or copy them to another folder
• What you would do now is chose all the 20 photos from the list of 200 photos selecting all the ones you want and copy them

Now my idea is to have a more intelligent clipboard. Mine would allow you to add objects (like photos) to some sort of a collection or list. Lets say you copy the first three images and you have to scroll down for more. Now if you select more photos and copy them, they are added to the collection of the previous selected photos. Now your clipboard contains five of your photos. Now you can paste these or add more photos to it.

One problem I have not found any solution for is how to empty such a collection. Of course, if you have those 5 photos and copy some text, the photo collection should be emptied. But what if you want to start a new photo collection? They should not be added to the previous clipboard (= photos from paragliding).

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Personally I would like to have something like this. Realistically speaking, this should not be such a big problem. The copy mechanism just should check the file header for the file type and add it to the appropriate stack or list. And the pasting method should ask what stack/list should be pasted.