macOS difficult missing functionality: Missing icon/file image for dragging out/filesystem location

[Jack S. 23151]

Adobe has made an egregious workflow error for UX in Photoshop and all of the Adobe product line for macOS for some years now. The file icon for each tab/image that's open has been missing. In normal macOS use this is actually a critical function for general and accepted practices. If you click, hold and drag out such an icon (as it used to be on older Photoshop from the app top border bar - and it any and all macOS apps that follow good practices suchas the iWork suite and other file and image editors) it would drag the file handle (file) out to any location you wish to drop it. This is extremely convient and leads to efficient practices and use on macOS since it is an accepted universal UI element. This function needs to be brought back and integrated into the filename display on tabs ASAP.

Missing this simply makes Photoshop and other apps too difficult to use on macOS when it comes to rapid file editing, sharing and filing, etc.

[S_Gans]

Hi. This is a user to user forum, so we make no decisions or adjustments to the app here. However, Adobe is active in watching the "Ideas" section of this forum. I recommend posting this kind of statement and your idea for it's resolution, under the Ideas section, visible at the top of the forum page.

[Jeff Arola]

It's still there , but one needs to use Floating Document Windows to see and use it.

With tabs you can right click on the tab and click Reveal in Finder

[Conrad_C]

I agree that the lack of the draggable standard document icon is inconvenient in document tabs (it is there in floating windows); and the correct thing to do is submit a feature request in the Ideas section, or a bug report in the Bugs section, if you decide that’s what it is.

However…because of your post I took a closer look at it, and now I think the Photoshop implementation is very close to how Apple handles tabbed documents in their own applications. The long explanation is below; the short answer is the document icon is not completely missing, and there are two workarounds you can use right now to see the document icon until Adobe can be convinced to add the document icon to each tab.

Workaround 1: Drag the tab to undock it into a floating window. The document icon appears in the window title bar for you to drag.

Workaround 2: Disable the Application Frame, and continue to use tabbed documents. By floating the shared document window, this makes Photoshop match how official Apple applications handle the document icon in tabbed documents.

The long explanation of the workarounds:

I looked at the iWork applications — Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and also TextEdit. Like you say, those Mac applications do use the standard macOS UI for tabbed documents.

In all those Mac apps, if you have multiple tabbed documents in a single window, a document’s icon is not in its tab — Photoshop is consistent with that part. Where they really diverge is that in macOS apps, the icon is in the shared window title bar above the tabs and toolbar. As you change tabs, the filename and icon in the title bar change to represent the active tab, so the icon (for the active tab only) is there to be dragged.

Of course, Photoshop does not provide a shared title bar for tabbed document windows…

…or at least, not in the default Photoshop mode where the Application Frame is active. Because if you choose Window > Application Frame to disable it, now Photoshop gives you…exactly what you get in Apple applications: You can have tabbed documents in a floating shared document window, with the draggable icon of the active document in the shared title bar…macOS standard behavior. That is what leads to workaround #2.

Workaround #1 doesn’t require disabling the Application Frame, since all you have to do is rip the document tab out of the tab row to float it as an independent document window with a standard macOS title bar with the icon in it. After you use the icon in the title bar, you can dock the document back in with the tabs if you want.

There’s still nothing wrong with requesting that Adobe put the document icon appear in each tab, although that would be inconsistent with macOS. To be consistent with macOS, as shown above, the request would be to change the name at the top of the application frame to represent the active document, not the application, and put the draggable document icon there. That way the icon would be available for a tabbed document in Photoshop even with the Application Frame enabled, and it would be more consistent with current macOS UI.

But given what you really want, it might be just as good to submit a feature request to Apple. Because as we see above it is not currently a standard for a document’s icon to be in its tab in macOS, but it could be more convenient, so maybe Apple should make that happen.

(I also looked at Affinity Photo, one of the major competitors to Photoshop and lauded for being a highly optimized Mac app. Affinity Photo does not put document icons in its tabs either. But maybe they would…if Apple made icons in tabs a macOS standard.)