Drag and drop stops working in maverick

Correct, an SSD does NOT remedy the situation.

Rather than me repeating many of the problems others are having

which I have with my system, It may be worth govong CONSTRUCTIVE feedback to Apple via the

OSX feedback form you can serch on Apple's site.

The more feedback they get regarding the issues the more likely they may realize it's a potential widespread problem and we ought to have a fix at some point soon.

Incidentally I completely agree that it's EXCESSIVE focus on iDevices and partial neglect to Mac OS.

I hope Apple never loses site of Mac OS and although iDevices makes a handsome revenue source I think it will always be limited

compared to a true computing desktop/laptop rinning a true OS.

Upgrading to an SSD, or something else that happened during that process, did solve the problem for me. It solved several, actually. I did not use Migration Assistant, but rather cloned with carbon copy cloner. Perhaps that made a difference.

same problem here. it's getting very frustrating to say the least. One quick question. is anybody using finder related 3rd party apps like XFINDER? maybe this interworking process is causing the problem? i will try to deactivate the 3rd party app and get back with input.

this is so crazy. as a designer it is basically impossible to go about my daily workflow without drag and drop functionality. and couple that with the losing wifi connection after my computer goes to sleep maverick issue and it's looking like i will be spending my night wiping my drive and reverting. unbelievable. after 16 years of designing on macs this is the last one i will buy. sloppy, sloppy work, apple.

I can say with some certainty its not caused by third party software (although its possible that makes it worse I dont know).

I had this drag and drop issue on a brand new iMac, in its first week. I had barely installed iTerm and I got hit by it.

Its just shonky OSX. It gets worse every release, and all Apple seem to care about is making the GUI more and more like iOS.

Just a quick input. Changed my mouse from wired to bluetooth or simply using the macbook pro provided pad with my fingers and ALL drag and drop & slection issues have gone away!!! checking the wired mouse i found no apparent and visible issues but using the above mentioned alternatives remedied all problems. Needless to say, Mavericks is a sub par experience Apple! (wifi connection closing when lid is closed, ongoing mail app issues with gmail connection, restarting the laptop which renders the monitor black/closed and utilising patchwork solutions to get screen back up and working, just to mention a few)

Hello there,

I've made a reparation of authorisations. This, on my MBP worked fine for the last week (I can drag and drop again). But it did nothing on my iMac.

How far can Apple ignore this discussion ? I don't know, but, I will look seriously to change of OS for the next investment of my companies.

I agree with some of you who maintain the idea of a separate OS between laptop and tablets. We do not wait the same from a laptop !

Apple ?

With Mavericks, I was unable to drag sent emails from a Smart Mailbox to the Finder. I was able to drag received emails to Finder. I edited rules for the Smart Folder, unchecking "Include messages from Sent." Now I am able to drag to Finder sent emails from Smart Mailboxes.

Well, after suffering with the Drag & Drop problem for quite a while on my 2010 MBP, I finally upgraded from 10.8.5 to Mavericks. I made 2 bootable CC Clones to an external drive. Then installed Mavericks on one of these to test. Long install but no problems. Booted up and no Drag & Drop issues. Ran through all my apps & everything seems to work. No Gmail issues. I ran it from this test drive for five days. Then yesterday I ran disk utility to verify and repair permissions on my internal drive (Mtn Lion). Installed Mavericks on my internal drive. So far it works great. I'm still holding my breath, but it's nice not to have to run "Sleep" every time I start up. (I probably just jinxed myself!)

This problem has occured with me on leopard, snow leopard, lion and mavericks, on a macbook pro 17" and on my current SSD macbook pro 15" bought in 2014.

It also happens with my girlfriend's snow leopard macbook 2007.

With me the problem always started when I moved in a drag and drop fashion more than ~50 files one by one. It would always and is always solved with a reboot.

With mavericks it is worse. I dragged and dropped 2 files and I can't anymore.

I will try to solve this by rebooting and fixing permissions. If it is a permanent fix I will tell you.

So far this has worked for me on my iMac. It hasn't gone to sleep yet, and that's what caused it to stop working, so we'll see if I have to do it (cmd + option + esc) every time it wakes up.

So I had same issues and seems like recconecting my magic mouse fixed it. When i used trackpad on my macbook pro it always worked. So if u have Bluetooth devices connected try reconnecting them 🙂

The inability to drag and drop files to my desktop has been a permanent debility of my Macbook Air--from the very start and through multiple operating systems. I have tried every suggestion, and nothing works. Add to this the constant corruption of the address book and the regular slowing down of email processes until I once again disable the address book--and I am coming to agree with other commenters here that Apple has to some degree abandoned the desktop/laptop OS. These are critical problems for those of us who rely on Apple products for productivity. I mean--I can't drag and drop files! That is a serious slowdown for me! I have to think that Apple really just doesn't care.

And if anyone does find the Ultimate way to fix this, please speak up. There are literally thousands of people that have been complaining about this for years.

I noticed the dragging and dropping becomes iffy after I upgraded to Maverick from Snow Leopard. The issue is noticeable in Finder, but not limited to Finder. It also impacts any applications that support drag and drop, from Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator to simple Google Drive in the web browser.

It seems to be that dragging accompanied with fast mouse movement would "lose" the drag while the mouse is in the mid air. The only way that seems to work around this from time to time would be dragging slowly and praying the same time.

Well, I put my programmer's hat on and tried to understand the system a little. Apparently, #OSX might have tried to avoid accidental click and drag for novice user, the short answer to this is user has to click and hold the button steady for roughly 0.5 seconds before dragging occurs. If the user does not and starts dragging within 0.5 seconds, there is a bug with OSX that whichever object that is under the mouse cursor when 0.5 second would end up being picked. I made up the 0.5 second here as I have no way to clock it preciously. This bug ends up making things so much more confusing.