Drag select keeps selecting a single item

[Duncro]

Hi

Love the software, but I am struggling to get this to work consistently.

As stated in the help:

• With the Move Tool selected, drag to draw a marquee around the object(s).*

I try to drag select items on the canvas but it keeps grabbing the first item under the cursor and dragging it along instead of creating a marquee.

Only way I get this to work is to lock an item and then dragging from there, or start from outside the drawing area.

Am I doing something wrong or is this normal?

 

[stokerg]

Hi Duncro and Welcome to the Forums,

 

This is normal.  Drag to select only works by creating the Marquee, so if you start dragging outside of an object you should see the Marquee.   If you have some items stacked on top of each other, like a background and then some shapes for example, it may be easier to Shift+click the items you want to select together than drawing out a marquee which may also select the background as well as the shapes, unless you lock the background.

[R C-R]

11 hours ago, Duncro said:

I try to drag select items on the canvas but it keeps grabbing the first item under the cursor and dragging it along instead of creating a marquee.

There is a non-obvious two step way to avoid this:

 

1. With the Move Tool selected, make sure no layer is selected. (A quick way to do this is to tap the escape key.)

2. Press & hold the Alt/Option key & then drag out the marquee.

 

If you do not do step one, as you probably know you will duplicate & drag the layer if the Alt/Option key is held down. This can be much more annoying than unintentionally dragging the layer because it takes two undos to correct -- one to undo the move (the "transform" step in the history panel) & another to undo the duplicate. It is easy to overlook that, do a single undo, & end up with multiple duplicate layers stacked on top of each other.

 

The Selecting Objects help topic is not at all clear about this. This is the closest I could find to any mention of using the Alt/Option key for this:

[Duncro]

Thank you very much R C-R!

[Jamesb203]

Trying to move multiple items after drag select was driving me crazy until i realised what was actually happening.

Using the move tool I drag over several objects which are then shown as selected with a wireframe. NOTE that one of the selected items has handles.
Click and drag the item with the handles to move the selection around the canvas. If you don't click the and drag the the item with handles it will de-select all and only select the one you clicked on to drag.

Grouping is another option to drag multiple objects, but your need to group items will vary.

It might be a good idea to make sure the preference/tools - "Select object when intersects with selection marquee" is ticked if you want a more relaxed selecting objects experience.

[Hangman]

23 minutes ago, Jamesb203 said:

Using the move tool I drag over several objects which are then shown as selected with a wireframe. NOTE that one of the selected items has handles.
Click and drag the item with the handles to move the selection around the canvas. If you don't click the and drag the the item with handles it will de-select all and only select the one you clicked on to drag.

Hi @Jamesb203 and welcome to the forums...

It sounds as though you have the Transform Objects Separately option selected in the context toolbar... If you deselect this and then marquee select several objects using the move tool your selection handles will appear around all the selected objects and you can click and select anywhere within the bounds of the selection handles to move the selected objects...

Transform Objects Separately Icon