clipboard

Definition: Area of memory reserved for temporarily holding items during editing. Usually making a cut or a copy of selected text, graphic or other item puts it into the clipboard. Once in the clipboard, the item can be pasted elsewhere into the original file, or, in most desktop operating systems, the item can be pasted into a completely different file.
Clip box
First, don't forget that the clipboard takes only one item at a time: cut a second item onto an already cut item and you've lost the first one forever. Hint: so don't interrupt cut and save operations. Second, remember that clipboard takes up system memory: when it's stuffed with a big cut, there's less memory for the program to work with and that when you've pasted, the cut still resides in the clipboard. When working with images, it's easy to forget a simple cut could be several megabytes in size which can seriously drag down a program like Photoshop. Answer: select a tiny weeny area of the image and copy into clipboard to 'empty' it. Later versions of some programs offer a 'purge' function to clear memory.

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