How to Drag and Drop Between iPhone Apps
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Apple is constantly raising the bar when it comes to implementing helpful features to enhance the overall user experience. One of those features is the ability to drag and drop between apps on your iPhone.
This was first introduced in iOS 11 back in 2017 and has been refined since. It allows users to move various kinds of content, such as text, images, URLs, and files, between different apps.
Mastering dragging and dropping between apps on your iPhone takes a bit of practice and sometimes requires both hands. However, once you get the hang of it, it will feel effortless and make tasks more efficient.
The feature has various practical applications, including moving a photo from your gallery to email, copying text from a webpage to a note or message, or sharing a file between iCloud and messaging apps. You can experiment with dragging and dropping between apps to see what works.
How to Drag and Drop Between Apps
To drag and drop a photo, for example, between apps, first open your Photos app and select the photo you want to move by holding down on the photo until you’re able to move it around. While continuing to hold your finger on the photo, swipe up to close the Photos app and open the app you wish to transfer it to, like Messages. Move the photo until it’s hovering over the conversation you wish to insert it into and release your finger. The conversation will open with the photo inserted.
These instructions might be a bit tricky to follow. Here’s a video guide created by Stephen Robles for those visual learners:
Mastering features like drag and drop will help you prepare to get the most out of iOS 18 when it’s available this fall. Drag and drop is even easier on the larger screens of iPads.
While Apple strives to make its operating systems as intuitive as possible, there’s sometimes still a learning curve. This will likely be the case with iOS 18, so it’s worthwhile to become as proficient as possible with the features currently available. Doing so will both simplify your user experience and prepare you for future iOS updates.
