Dragging an Image From Devonthink to Affinity Photo while Holding Option Key (Or Other)

For a long time, now, I’ve yearned to be able to just drag an image from DT to copy it into Affinity Photo, Designer, or Publisher. Right now, dragging an image creates a text layer instead of the image layer in all of these apps. Good old copy and paste seems to be a work around, but I feel that one should be able to perform the natural act of dragging and dropping from DT to Affinity. When I brought it up on Affinity forums, they explained that DT encapsulates files in a text container of some sort, which is why a text layer is produced instead of an image layer after dragging. This sounded like a pass of the buck as I’ve been able to drag and drop image copies into apps like PS and Gimp thusfar.

Dragging an image from DEVONthink into Afffinity Photo does work. But only when no document in Affinity Photo is open. If the image gets added to an open document the image turns into a text like you described.

Did they have an explanation for that too?

Welcome @drumonit

The information in a drag and drop operation is processed by the receiving application so it’s how the Affinity is interpreting the data.

Also, as @suavito points out, this issue seems to only occur with existing documents . For example, dragging to Affinity Photo’s dock icon open the files individually with no issue.

Perhaps, Development would have some idea what may be going on, but this appears to be Affinity’s issue.

Yes, I forgot to mention that I’m experiencing this only when dragging into an already open Affinity document. I found out that images from DT can be dragged to create a new document in Affinity only after I had posted to their forum. Perhaps I’ll take it back up with them.