Directly paste clipboard image into gmail message

Unless I'm missing the point, what the OP talks about is perfectly doable. Gmail will paste any clipboard copied image as an inline image in an HTML mail, when doing Ctrl+V.

So do Alt+Print Screen, to copy the active program window as an actual image, and then paste it in the mail body using Ctrl+V, as an actual image.

Your problem is that unless you store the image somewhere, Gmail has no way to reference it. So what you see as "paste" is actually:

• store image locally temporarily
• upload image to some hosting service, or gmail
• embed image-tag in mail message

So you would need a 3rd party solution for this.

TechSmiths Jing might be what you need.

http://www.jingproject.com