I built a tiny Chrome extension that copies images out of Google Docs

So here's a thing that always drove me nuts. You can't right click an image in Google Docs and save it. Docs draws the whole page onto a canvas, so there's no real image sitting there to grab. Your only options were taking a screenshot (blurry, screen res) or downloading the entire doc as Word and digging through the files like it's 2009.

I do this all the time, usually pulling a diagram out of a doc to drop into Slack, so I finally just built the thing. It's called Pixlift. One click and the original full res image is on your clipboard.

The part I found fun to figure out:

My first version was a screenshot and crop tool. I threw it out almost immediately because honestly that's no better than Cmd+Shift+4, and you end up with a fuzzy screen res copy instead of the actual file. So instead it grabs the doc's own .docx export, which is secretly just a zip. It fetches that using your existing logged in session, unzips it right there in the browser with the built in DecompressionStream, and reads the original images straight out of the archive. No servers, no Drive API, no extra login, nothing leaves your machine. Vanilla JS, no dependencies.

Where the launch is at, being fully honest:

Published to the Chrome Web Store about 4 days ago. 13 installs so far. First rating came in and it was 5 stars. Pretty much every install traces back to two Reddit posts.

Some stuff I'm figuring out as I go:

Distribution matters way more than the product itself. When people actually see it explained, a good chunk of them install it. The hard part isn't the tool, it's getting in front of eyeballs.

The launch bump is real and short. A post spikes installs for a day or two and then it cools off. Interestingly mine dipped and then ticked back up a little, so it's not totally dead between posts, which was nice to see.

I am wondering though, should I open source it for the trust and the contributors, or keep it closed?