(Regression from 1.8) Dragging images directly from your web browser into Affinity no longer imports them as an image layer but instead shows the URL in a text layer

[Frozen Death Knight]

One aspect that I have come to really appreciate about the Affinity Suite as an artist is the ability to quickly create your own reference boards within your documents by dragging stuff directly from your web browser into the programs. With artboards in Designer this feature has been an absolute joy to work with because of the near infinite canvas available. However, with 1.9 this single feature no longer works as it should. Instead of importing the actual image when dragging it into Affinity it instead imports the URL link on a text layer.

If this change just happens to be intentional, I would highly appreciate it if you reverted the change by adding in an option to import the image as an image layer like it used to. To me this is a great quality of life feature by not having to browse online every time to look at specific references you want for a project, so I would be really sad to see it go.

[walt.farrell]

Works fine as long as you drag an actual image, not an image that is really a link you're supposed to click on to see something else. When you try to drag an image that is really a link then you get the link URL. (Edit: And I just tested on 1.8, and that's exactly how it worked there, too.)

You might try right-clicking, and if available choosing View Image. Then drag that image to your artboard.

 

[Frozen Death Knight]

9 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Works fine as long as you drag an actual image, not an image that is really a link you're supposed to click on to see something else. When you try to drag an image that is really a link then you get the link URL. (Edit: And I just tested on 1.8, and that's exactly how it worked there, too.)

You might try right-clicking, and if available choosing View Image. Then drag that image to your artboard.

 

You are right about it working the same in 1.9 and earlier versions after doing some extra testing by reinstalling 1.8.5. However, I know for sure that the results for using Affinity now is different this time around than it was in the past. I did some extra digging and found out the true reason why the behaviour was different: I switched web browsers fairly recently.

When I booted up Firefox again which used to be my standard web browser and attempted the same drag and drop action, the feature worked as it should. However, with Google Chrome and other web browsers based on the same architecture (i.e. Opera and Brave) this functionality changes to Affinity just copying the URL. Here's a video demonstration:

So in this case I accidentaly stumbled upon different behaviours and thought it behaved the same across all browsers, which was not the case. Because of this I would like to retract my previous report and replace it with a report about how dragging images from different browser types produce different results, i.e. Chrome vs Firefox architecture. If possible I would like to see this changed to the Firefox behaviour on the other web browsers as well, since it is a pretty useful feature. Maybe even give different settings options for how this drag and drop behaviour should behave if people prefer the other behaviour?

[Sean P]

6 hours ago, Frozen Death Knight said:

So in this case I accidentaly stumbled upon different behaviours and thought it behaved the same across all browsers, which was not the case. Because of this I would like to retract my previous report and replace it with a report about how dragging images from different browser types produce different results, i.e. Chrome vs Firefox architecture. If possible I would like to see this changed to the Firefox behaviour on the other web browsers as well, since it is a pretty useful feature. Maybe even give different settings options for how this drag and drop behaviour should behave if people prefer the other behaviour?

Unfortunately I don't believe there is anything we can do about it, it looks like a restriction on Chrome's part. MS Paint, Photoshop and Illustrator all behaved in a similar way (Photoshop and Paint refused Chrome's drag, Illustrator placed the URL) where as Firefox's came in as an image on all 3 apps.

I will double check with development to see if it is possible, but it certainly looks like an issue with Chrome rather than us.