How to Drag and Drop Photos Between iPhone Apps

Multitasking can be difficult on a small phone screen. Apple’s drag and drop tool makes it easy to move photos, text, links, and more between your favorite apps. This powerful feature can improve your photo or text manipulation.

Photos App Header

RAYMOND OGLESBY @RaymondOglesby2
November 3, 2021

Multitasking can be difficult on a small phone screen. Apple’s drag and drop tool makes it easy to move photos, text, links, and more between your favorite apps. This powerful feature can improve your photo or text workflow.

 iOS 15 gives you the ability to simply drag something, such as a photo, from one app, and drop it in another. No messing around with downloading items or copy and pasting. Lets see how this is done.

This is for the iPhone running iOS 15 or higher

Copyright Scott Adams, Inc./Distributed by Universal Uclick for UFS

Drag and Drop Requirements

There are quite a few things you can drag and drop on the iPhone. Photos and text are the most obvious, but you can also grab videos, documents, links, audio files, and PDFs. However, you will need a source and destination app that supports the feature.

Developers need to implement drag and drop support in their app, which means the feature is not available everywhere. Apple’s own apps support it, including Safari, Mail, Messages, and Files. Other supported apps include Gmail, and WhatsApp.

Drag and Drop Essentials

First, open an app that supports the feature. In our example, we will be dragging a photo from Photos to Messages, but the action is exactly the same for text, links, and other items. If you are unable to find your Photos app, navigate to your first screen and use the Spotlight Search, to find the app. Refer to below image for the Photos app:

Photos 1
Accessing Photos app

Next, select a photo. See below image:

Photos 2
Find a photo to drag and drop

Now, hold a finger down on a photo until you feel a little vibration. Keep your finger pressed on the screen and drag the photo until it floats. Do not stop holding the selecting object. In our example, we have moved the photo to another spot on the Photos screen, my finger is still holding down on the photo. See following image:

Photos 3
Dragging a Photo while holding down my finger on the photo

Now, with a different finger, navigate around the iPhone like you normally would. Keep the first finger pressed on the photo and use your other finger to open the destination. In our example, we are dropping the photo onto a Message, then release your finger. Refer to below image:

Photos 4
Dropping the photo onto a Message and releasing your finger

Quote For the Day

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

Steve Jobs

That’s it you now know how to drag and drop a photo. Please feel free to share this post! One way to share is via Twitter.

Just click the Tweet icon below. This will launch Twitter where you click its icon to post the Tweet.

Check out TechSavvy.Life for blog posts on smartphones, PCs, and Macs! You may email us at contact@techsavvy.life for comments or questions.

I Would Like to Hear From You

Please feel free to leave a comment. I would love hearing from you. Do you have a computer or smart device tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Just send an email to contact@techsavvy.life. Please mention the device, app, and version you are using. To help us out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.

The author’s Vietnam eBook on the Battle for Tra Bong Vietnam: Events and Aftermath
Advertisement

Author: Raymond

I am Raymond Oglesby, an Information Technology (IT) specialist with 30 years in the field. I have taught Microsoft Applications and troubleshot computers in 15 countries and many States. My career was focused on mainframes and desktops from application development to implementation. I have written hundreds of programs for various architectures. I decided to start a blog to share my knowledge and experiences with you. I plan on updating this blog at least twice a week about smart phone apps to Windows. Please feel free to leave a Comment or Tweet. I would love to hear from you. Do you have a computer tech question? I will do my best to answer your inquiry. Please mention the app and version that you are using. To help me out, you can send screenshots of your data related to your question.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: