Did you know that you can drag and drop content (images, logos, text files, Word documents) from Adobe Bridge, the Macintosh Finder or Windows Explorer into Adobe InDesign or Illustrator? You can even drag and drop multiple files at once onto your pages this way.
What prompted this blog post is that I keep getting asked: "I know I can drag and drop content into InDesign, but I don't trust it...where does it put my files?"
It's perfectly OK to bring content into InDesign and Illustrator this way. If you look closely at the Links panel in InDesign, you'll see that a link to the graphics that have been dragged and dropped has been created, exactly as if you had done File > Place. There is absolutely no difference in the end result between File > Place and the drag and drop method.
In the case of Illustrator, dragging and dropping a graphic will result in a linked graphic, and adding the shift key during drag and drop will result in an embedded graphic.
Thank you so much for your clear explanation of this! I had been searching Google for an answer and yours was the only successful one! (A million answers including "drop shadow, of course) I'm a complete newbie and discovered D+D by my own intuition but hadn't known whether it does something different than place (Because of the wording "Dropping from X).
ReplyDeleteThank you again!!