>Do things faster with drag and drop

This familiar interaction, which you’ve used on the Mac for years, has finally made its way to iOS as a system-wide feature. Apps need to be updated to support it, so your favorites may take a while to catch up. You’ve already seen how it’s used for multitasking on iPad, and there are many other places it comes in useful.

Drag and drop makes a world of difference to how efficiently you can get things done on iPad. It works between apps: start dragging some text or a picture, say, switch to another app, and drop your selection there. You can drag images, files, or selected text, and even reminders (which paste as text), contacts (which paste in vCard format), and map locations (more on those in a moment).

Though drag and drop is more limited on iPhone – whatever you drag is abandoned if you try to switch apps – the technique works within individual apps and on the Home screen, making certain tasks faster on your phone, too. Here are some of our favorite ways to use drag and drop in iOS. Online research

Say you have Safari and Notes open together in Split View or Slide Over. Hold your finger on a link in Safari and it’ll lift “off” the page. Drag it over to Notes so the insertion point is where you want to add the link, then let go – much faster than the Share sheet. Add photos to an album In Photos, start dragging a picture, then tap others to pick them up too. They can even be from different albums or Memories. While holding them, use another digit to browse to the album you want to add them to, then let go of them. locations in Maps

Hold on your location’s marker, a dropped pin, a point of interest, or a recent location in the panel and drag and drop it into an email, message, or note. Rich objects such as map locations, which don’t paste as text, can be dragged again from where you drop them. The Home screen

Hold on an app icon to make them all jiggle, then drag it a short way. Tap more icons to add to your selection, then drag and drop them in a folder or another Home screen page. They appear in reverse order of pickup, so tap backward from Z to drop in order from A to Z.