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Drag and drop to upload files in Firefox

September 2nd, 2007

In Firefox, when you need to upload a file to a web service such as an online photo lab or attach a document to your web mail compose page, you know you have to press the Browse… button and look for the file. If it’s more than one, you repeat.

Not any more with DragDropUpload, a Firefox extension developed by Emanuele Ruffaldi that allows to drag a file from a folder to the file text box usually found in file upload web forms. Even further, if the web form has several file upload fields, you can drag several files at a time and DragDropUpload will place them on available fields.

As a special case, it also handles single and multiple attachments for Gmail. Just drag and drop your selection to the Attach a file link. The screen capture below shows how it works.

I tried dragging files to the current Yahoo! Mail Beta Attach file but it only worked with single files. In Ubuntu 7.04 I couldn’t get it to work neither with a single file nor multiple in any web service.

DragDropUpload also adds a Drag Drop sidebar that shows your computer files where you can browse and select files and drag them to the necessary field. But somehow it defeats the original purpose of the extension of skipping the tedious file browsing when the file is already visible somewhere else.

In summary, it is a neat and handy enhancement I would like to see available by default in Firefox.

Get DragDropUpload from Mozilla Add-ons.

Via Mozillalinks.org

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