saving files per drag-n-drop

About two months ago, I added a feature to the development branch of GIMP that is so well hidden that it is probably worth to advertize it a bit. The feature is the ability to save an image by dragging it to an XDS enabled file manager.

The X Direct Save protocol is a somewhat underrated extension to XDND and allows users to save a file by simply dragging it to a file manager window. Unfortunately neither nautilus nor konqueror support this protocol yet, but ROX-filer does. So if you are a happy user of this file-manager, and GIMP shows you the list of unsaved images in its Quit dialog, you can simply drag the images out of this list to the directories you want them to be saved in. This also works from the image preview in the toolbox and from the Images dialog.

I’d love to see XDS support being added to my desktop of choice.

6 Responses to “saving files per drag-n-drop”

  1. bkor Says:

    Please remove the space at the start of the XDS link (that creates a broken link on p.g.o).

  2. Tamara Says:

    i guess i don’t do enough in the gimp, i just realized today that i can open files by drag-and-drop. i’m starting to use nautilus for file management and it’s interesting. i’m way too used to the command-line for it to be natural but i can see some really good ideas there in dragging and dropping files. it almosts makes me wish i had two monitors so i could have nautilus windows in one and apps in the other. exciting, exciting.

  3. oliv Says:

    Could you make it work from the layer thumbnails too? That is what I tried and it did work for me. I will try the image preview of image dialogs tonight.

  4. oliv Says:

    >That is what I tried and it did work for me
    Sorry, a small but important word is missing for the message to make sense: “it did _not_ work for me”
    (and the “of” is actually a “or”)

  5. neo Says:

    GIMP doesn’t currently support saving a single layer. I am not sure if that feature should be added but if we decided to do that, we’d of course make the layer preview an XDS drag source as well.

  6. Holy Shmoly! :: Saving files per drag-n-drop Says:

    [...] ls of unsaved images. In the development version you can drag and drop those thumbnails to a “XDS” compatible fi [...]