Using Drag and Drop On Your iPhone or iPad

Drag-and-drop on the iPhone is greatly improved in iOS 15. You can now drag images, files, text and other items between apps. To do this you'll need to master use multiple fingers to drag at the same time as you switch apps.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at Drag and Drop on the iPhone. 
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So iOS 15 brings significant improvement to Drag and Drop on the iPhone. You can now Drag and Drop between apps and it works just like it does on the Mac. So let's start off with a simple example using the Photos App. This is one of the most common types of Drag and Drop you may want to do. Drag a photo from the Photos App to say a Mail message. So I'm going to go into Photos and then I'm going to start dragging a photo by tapping it and moving. Now if I tap for a little bit too long then I get a Context Menu. But that's okay. Just keep dragging away and you could see you're now dragging that item. Now this is where multi-touch comes in. You have to keep your index finger down on this item that you're dragging. Don't ever lift it up or the drag will end. But you can use other fingers to do other things. 
So I'm going to swipe up from the bottom here to go Home. Notice I'm still dragging this item around. So now I'm going to go into another app. Let's go into Mail. I'm going to start a new message. I'm going to tap the composition button there at the bottom right and I'm going to drag and drop into the Mail message. So now I've dragged and dropped an image from Photos into mail. Of course you can go into other apps as well. So let's drag this image here and go into the Messages app. I'll drag it down here to send it to somebody. Here's another example. Let's use Notes. But this time instead of going to the Home screen I'm going to drag iup slightly from the bottom like that and go into the App Switcher. This will show me all the recently used apps. So I can actually go over to one and then select it. Now I'm in the Notes app and I can drop the image here and it will insert it into Notes.
Let's do one with Pages. But this time I'm going to Drag and Drop multiple items. So I'm going to select this one and start dragging it. But the next thing I'm going to do is tap to select another item. So now I'm actually dragging a stack of two items. So let's go into the App Switcher. I'm going to use my other finger to go to Pages. Now in Pages I'm in Read Only mode. So I can still activate things on the screen by tapping buttons with other fingers even while I'm dragging these two items. So I'll tap Edit. Now I'm in Edit Mode. Let's go to where I want to insert these two images and I'll drop them here. You can see it's going to insert both. Let's tap away and then tap one of the items. Now you can see I can manipulate it and I have two different items here. So I was able to Drag and Drop two items at once. 
This also works with third party apps but the third party app has to support it. So let's start dragging and dropping an item here and let's go to a third party app. In this case Pixelmator. In Pixelmator here I have an image I'm already working on. I'm going to drop this one in thus importing this image into the project. But of course if the app hasn't been updated to support iOS 15 and Drag and Drop then it won't work. 
Now on the Mac you can Drag and Drop from Photos to the Finder to Export an image. You can do the same thing now in iOS 15. Of course instead of the Finder you've got the Files App. So let's go into Photos. I'll start dragging an image like this. I'll go to the Files App and then I'll go to where it is I want to drop it. Let's just put it in this folder and I'll add it. This actually will act like an export. Since this is also in iCloud Drive it uploads to iCloud Drive. So it really does work just like it does in the Finder. 
This, of course, brings us to the Files App which is another place you probably want to Drag and Drop from. So you can do the same things here. I can take an image that's already here in the Files app, so this is the file, and I can Drag and Drop it into, say, a Mail message. Or I can Drag and Drop this into Pages. Everything I've done so far now has been images. But you can do the same with other file types. So, for instance, here's a PDF. Let's say I want to attach that to an email message. I can go to the Mail app and here I'm composing a message already and I can Drop in this PDF file as an attachment. You can also Drag and Drop from the Files app into the Photos App. So importing into Photos. So I'll switch here to the Photos App and I'll drop this in and it acts just like an import. 
Another type of Drag and Drop you may want to do is Drag and Drop text. So here I've selected some text in Notes. I can start to Drag it by tapping, holding, and then moving and then I can switch away to Mail, for instance, and drag this text into there. You can do the same thing on the web. So, for instance, I can select some text here in a webpage and I can start dragging it. Now I can switch to Notes, for instance, then drop it right here. 
It also works in other situations. For instance, in Safari I could Drag and Drop the webpage like that from the bar at the bottom or at the top depending upon how you have it set. I could go into another app likes Notes and drop it here and it drops the link with the Preview. I can even go into the News App and I could drag a news story like that and I could go, say, into Mail and I can drop that and you could see it adds the link. We're going to work here in Maps and I've selected a location and I can drag and drop from the top here and I could go into Mail or let's say Notes and I could drag that into there. 
So as you can see Drag and Drop is now almost on par with using a desktop computer. So give this a try on you iPhone with iOS 15 or iPad with iPad OS 15. A lot of this worked on the iPad in previous versions of iPad OS as well. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Drag and Drop On Your iPhone or iPad”

Razvan Mihai

2 years ago

Gary: This is great. I have always wanted to link a specific mail to Notes or Calendar in iOS, similar to how it is possible on iPadOS or macOS. Your video prompted me to try this again - it finally works! I find it much easier to do this with two hands, though. In my scenario above, I press and hold a specific mail with the left-hand thumb and do the moving part with the right-hand index or thumb.

Michael Scott

Hi Gary,
This is great. I have a need to copy multiple files from Notes to OneDrive. I would not be able to do it without this shortcut. For some reason, if I share a document scan Note with OneDrive, it transfers as a PDF, which is what I need. But if I drag and drop notes they show up as something called an RTFD file, which I can't open. Thanks in advance if you can shed any light on this.

Jeanne Dyer

Wonderful! Great demonstration of drag and drop on iPhone. Thanks.

Comments Closed.

Using Drag and Drop On Your iPhone or iPad

Comments: 3 Responses to “Using Drag and Drop On Your iPhone or iPad”

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