I used to be able to drag images out of Google Chrome and drop them into Windows Explorer or programs like Photoshop. Over the past while this has become erratic, sometimes working and others not, and now it seems not to work at all. When it doesn't work you get the no entry mouse pointer and nothing happens when you release the mouse button. The problem exists equally for images embedded in pages or when the image URL was opened directly.
I am using Chrome 13.0.782.55 beta-m on Windows 7 64-bit. But as steps below show this happens with Internet Explorer 9 too so perhaps the fault lies with Windows rather than the browsers.
The following steps can duplicate the problem on my setup.
- Open http://craniac.net/2011/04/29/surface-tension/, a page on my blog.
- Try to drag the picture of the aloe leaves to Windows Explorer. It doesn't work.
- Middle-click or use context menu to open the image in a new tab.
- Try to drag the image from the new tab. It doesn't work.
- Select the image URL, open IE9, paste the URL and navigate to it.
- Try to drag the image from IE9 to Windows Explorer. It doesn't work.
I originally thought this was a problem with Chrome but while typing this and finding it doesn't work with IE9 either I now think this may be something a recent Windows update has caused.
Using Save image as... still works so I can still get the image, just not as conveniently as drag & drop allows.
Any ideas on the cause, and more importantly the fix for this?
