Dragging Multiple Images Out of Safari
15-year-old “TopTechGeek” with a tip that blew my mind: iOS 15 Safari lets you select and drag multiple images from a web page.
Cool video. You can also drag and drop to the Files app. Unfortunately, the feature only seems to work with images. If I try to drag multiple PDF or ZIP files to a folder in Files, instead of downloading them it saves .txt files with their URLs.
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Tapping to add to the dragged items goes all the way back to the original iPad's drag-and-drop implementation in Keynote (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fk1V5NqoD4 at 49:20). When real, OS-wide drag-and-drop support was introduced in iOS 11 (see https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/203/ ), tap-to-add was brought in. (In other words, this has probably been possible for a while as a latent capability, although I couldn't make it work on the iOS 11.4 Simulator.)
In iOS vs iPadOS: a) the "preview" mode that a long press snaps into where you get the preview tile and actions takes up most of the screen, making it less obvious that you can keep dragging to start a drag and b) drag-and-drop has remained single-app, so there's been limited circumstances for it to even do something. With iOS 15 enabling cross-app drag-and-drop, there's room for this to mean something more than move/rearrange within the app and so be more universally useful. So part of that is filing Radars to make sure, for example, that dropping into Files does the right thing with the list of URLs.
@Jesper Yes, it’s a bit tricky on a small phone. At first, I wasn’t dragging high enough. You have to get almost up into the notch. But if you go too far it will start scrolling.
This has always been an incredibly awkward and error-prone combination gesture, all the more so on small touchscreens. Bring back the NeXTSTEP Shelf.
Yoinks is an excellent utility that provides a modern shelf and more, a terrific workflow enhancement (there's both a Mac and an iOS version). Well designed software, extremely useful.
