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Sometimes i am able to drag & drop image from browsers right into any image editing software but not always. Such method allows me to circumvent image saving to hard drive and directly place it into image editing software. I would like to know why is this method not always working.

UPDATE: I want to add that usually when i can drag & drop image into image editing software, i can see + within rectangle appear below mouse pointer. When i cannot drag & drop, i see strike through circle only. Does not matter whether i have "save image as" option in right-click menu or don't.

I am using Windows 7 64-bit and latest versions of Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Thanks.

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  • do you have some sample websites/photo sources that we can look at? It probably has something to do with how the image is being rendered on the page. Jan 25, 2012 at 22:11
  • superuser.com google.com
    – Boris_yo
    Jan 26, 2012 at 9:12
  • I think you are missing the point of my question so I just went with some general examples. It may not apply to your particular situation. Jan 26, 2012 at 21:30
  • What image editor is this? Jan 30, 2012 at 23:24
  • MS Paint and Paint.NET are ones i tried so far with.
    – Boris_yo
    Jan 31, 2012 at 1:48

1 Answer 1

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From what I can tell using firefox and paint.net, it has a lot to do with how the picture is rendered. Let's take this page for example. If you use chrome, you can right click on a picture and choose inspect element to see what the HTML is for that object. Let's look at some examples:

Super User Logo at top of this screen:

<a href="/">Super User</a>

This code tells us that the Logo itself is not really a logo, but text with a background image that is generated with CSS. When you drag and drop, the photo editing system thinks you are trying to paste in text resulting in failure.

Your user icon on this question:

Image

This now looks like an actual picture with a full HTML address for the photo software to go looking for. Drag and dropping this item works because there is an actual image at that address.

Google Image searchm first result for "Test"

<a id="rg_hpl" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=en&amp;safe=active&amp;gbv=2amp;
biw=1184&amp;bih=665&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbnid=UeYWZFjYErEM6M:&amp;imgrefurl=http://xkcd.com
/329/&amp;docid=3RREZVfSPVfy9M&amp;imgurl=http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turing_test.png&
amp;w=320&amp;h=394&amp;ei=_cIhT_mEEsTDmQWO44GuDA&amp;zoom=1&amp;iact=rc&amp;dur=119&
amp;sig=108756717684034720355&amp;page=1&amp;tbnh=154&amp;tbnw=125&amp;start=0&amp;ndsp=20&
amp;ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&amp;tx=103&amp;ty=28"></a>

On this site, the images are not actually images. The objects are links to other websites. While the image URL is in this object, your photo editor has no idea what to do with it.


While I may be wrong to the actual reason, this is how my understanding of web technology explains this behavior.

I should note that most images are cached locally on your computer when you view them.

Hope this helps

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  • Still does not work. Maybe it has to do with permissions?
    – Boris_yo
    Jan 26, 2012 at 22:33
  • Doubtful, I think it depends on how the image is displayed and what the capabilities of the photo editor is. Jan 30, 2012 at 23:23

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