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Dragging to other applications doesn't work any longer

I used iPhoto before and back then I could easily drag pictures to Photoshop to edit them, to a LibreOffice document to embedd it or to a website within Chrome to for example attach it to an existing thread on Facebook.


With Photos, non of these works any longer. I could only drag it to the Pages app, which looks like Apple broke drap&drop in Photos. I do _not_ want to export or save pictures first somewhere in between to attach them as a normal file. I want drag&drop as before.

OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Apr 15, 2015 3:34 AM

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11 replies

Apr 15, 2015 4:41 AM in response to Alley_Cat

This is weird - I've been adding items to Calendar on iPhone and gone back to Mac - another 3 videos have appeared many minutes after I attempted the drag and drop - they are not huge files, but I have an error also:


User uploaded file

However that file has been exported!


Could the system be doing an actual modified export of some kind rather than a simple copy of the file?


Initially wondered if the drive holding the file had spun down hence the lag, but would have expected the other to copy quickly if that was the case once it had spun up.



Alley_Cat wrote:


Winston Churchill wrote:


I can drag images and movies to the desktop and folders.

Just managed to drag a Canon video clip but it's really hit and miss - worked once in about 10 tries!

Apr 15, 2015 4:52 AM in response to Alley_Cat

Alley_Cat wrote:



Could the system be doing an actual modified export of some kind rather than a simple copy of the file?


Grrrr!!!!


I don't believe it - it has actually exported it modifying the original 1080p video and downconverting it to 720p.


The fact that you cannot easily view original images/movie files in their actual location via Finder makes such comparisons difficult but I know this was 1080p video.


Within photos:


User uploaded file


File dragged to user's home folder:


User uploaded file


Note change of file extension and resolution!

Apr 15, 2015 5:35 AM in response to Alley_Cat

Alley_Cat wrote:

I can drag images to folders but not video clips - do you see that?

I can drag video clips to folders, but I noticed that there is a delay roughly proportional to the video's file size before it appears in the folder. There is no indication from Finder or Photos that the process is occurring so it can seem like nothing happens until the file finally shows up in the folder -- which could be several minutes or even hours for large files.


This seemed puzzling until I noticed that the files I was dragging out of Photos had the .MOV extension but in the folder were showing up with the .m4v one, & the folder copy was smaller, both in file size & in frame size. (For example, a short 1920X1080, 160 MB MOV source file became a 1280X720, 80MB m4v one in the folder.) Changing the Photos File > Export "Movie Quality" option from 720p to 1080p had no effect on the drag & drop, so it looks like 720p is 'hard wired' into the drag & drop action, at least for 1080p mov files.


I also noticed that using the Photos File > Export function with the "Movie Quality" option set to 1080p preserved the frame size, but the exported mov file still was converted to the m4v format, its file size was smaller, & the delay before the export appeared in the chosen folder was about the same as with the drag & drop method.


So it seems obvious that the delay is caused by the video file conversion & re-encoding process, not because of some bug in D&D support in Photos -- what Apple would probably dismiss as "works as expected" in reply to a bug reporter submission.

Apr 15, 2015 5:41 AM in response to Alley_Cat

Alley_Cat wrote:

The fact that you cannot easily view original images/movie files in their actual location via Finder makes such comparisons difficult ...

You beat me to it on the conversion thing, but note that you can use spotlight to find the actual location -- just copy the filename from the Photos Info window & paste it into a Finder or Spotlight find query.

Apr 15, 2015 5:48 AM in response to R C-R

That's what I figured out too (see comment above) having discounted the possibility that the file was on a drive that had spun down - the first might be slow but other should have 'copied' quickly once the drive had spun up. What gave me the lightbulb moment was taking a break to do something else and then finding several 'failed' files had appeared.


Unfortunately I had hoped it would remember the last custom export setting but even that doesn't help as there's no option to choose original as the quality as it's a separate export option.


In an ideal world there would be an export by drag and drop configuration setting in Preferences but I doubt they'll implement anything like that.


Also Photos get recompressed when exporting by drag and drop though resolution seems to be preserved.


When you know what it does, you can work around it, but I fear some will think they are exporting original files when they aren't using drag and drop and may get stung down the line when they realise.

Apr 15, 2015 7:04 AM in response to Alley_Cat

Unfortunately, drag & drop gets a little ambiguous for something like Photos because there may be both an original & an edited version, so there is no simple way to specify which one you want while dragging.


Making drag & drop configurable in Photos' preferences is one possibility, but I suspect in practice that could get complicated, since some users would want originals while others would want edited versions, some would want a specific resolution while others would want some "smart" adaptive process that never up-sampled, etc.; plus there is the problem of how to deal with multiple selected items of different resolutions or file types.


I'm sure Apple could figure out something but whatever it was would satisfy some users but the majority would probably find it either too confusing or not flexible enough to meet their expectations.

Dragging to other applications doesn't work any longer

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