[lorenzo]

Hi all,

I was trying to drag pictures from safari to a mail message window (love the idea to do everything quick & simple with mac
but had almost no success.

Behaviour is weird.
If the image is into a html page, then drag'n drop seems to work.
But if it's got a link, and maybe gets opeed at full res on a new page, then dragging it only shows a little "Nameoftheimage.jpeg", with a very little size (like 95bytes, or 1kb)
But, if I click "copy" on the image (even if opened in the new window at full res), and then paste it in the Mail message, it works again...
Beats me!

Anyone knows how to get consistent drag'n drop from safari to mail?
I want to work in the sleek, nice, elegant Mac way and forget windows (and... Lord, my looong Linux years also... :-)

Lorenzo

P.S.
Mail is Tiger's 10.4.10 mail.

[Juneappal]

I don't know how to change this behavior, but I can confirm that it is expected behavior. When you drag a photo from the web, you are "selecting" both the image and its location. The receiving application then make a decision about which pat of the data is likely to be the intended content. Mail chooses the location. Finder chooses the image itself. Dock chooses the URL (try dragging a photo into the part of the dock by the trashcan.) Clipboard choose the image itself - that's why copy and paste "works" but drag and drop doesn't. BbEdit takes the URL, since it doesn't handle images at all anyway.

With BBEdit, you can get the URL by drag and drop, but if you copy and paste, you get nothing, since the clipboard strips out the URL in favor of the image.


That doesn't help you at all - I suspect there is no solution for you. If you are lucky, though, you will someday come across a situation in which the actual behavior in Mail is the preferred behavior. Let me know if you do ;-)

I solve this with expose, by the way - drag an image, F11 to reveal desktop, where I drop it, then immediately grab it again and F11 or F9 to bring my mail window into view, where I can drop the non-ambiguous image from the desktop.

[lorenzo]

Thanks for the answer!

Althugh a expecteb behaviour, I didn't find it very consistent: sometimes drag and dropping causes the image to go straight into mail instead of the link.
This happens when the image is embedded in a page; if the image is opened by itself (like http://your.web.site/something/image001.jpg), then Mail will get not the image but the link.
Odd!

Your explosé trick sounds effective... but I've been telling all of my friends "Macs are just EASY", and this looks a lot like a Linux workaround :-)

Lory

[Juneappal]

That doesn't match my experience. I find that:
* Images dragged from safari to the mail icon in the dock ALWAYS paste as a URL.
* Images embedded in page paste as a displayed inline attachment when dragged to the message window.
* Images that are open by themselves in a safari window paste as a non-displayed attachment when dropped in message window. (The message shows the image icon, rather than the image itself, but it is sent with the email.)

Pe-culiar.

I suppose I would explain bullet one by saying that often one wants to send someone a link to something. The mail icon in the dock first looks to see if the dragged content includes a link. If so, it uses that. Why that is different for the dock icon and the message window?....?

[lorenzo]

I see.
I just replicated Mail's behaviour though, pretty easy.
Search something on Google Images, click on a image who belongs to a website.
the website opens, and from there u can drag and drop the image to mail, and it works.
But click on the image itself, so that it opens completely in safari, drag and drop, and here's your link!

Well, let's try with the new Mail of "Lepperd" as the speaker pronouces it in the videos!

Lorenzo