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Drag and drop uploads from another web page

Lukas Peyer edited this page Jul 2, 2014 · 17 revisions

The following code snippet allows to upload images by drag&drop from another webpage:

<script src="https://raw.github.com/betamax/getImageData/master/jquery.getimagedata.min.js"></script>
<script>
$(document).bind('drop dragover', function (e) {
    // Prevent the default browser drop action:
    e.preventDefault();
});
$(document).bind('drop', function (e) {
    var url = $(e.originalEvent.dataTransfer.getData('text/html')).filter('img').attr('src');
    if (url) {
        $.getImageData({
            url: url,
            success: function (img) {
                var canvas = document.createElement('canvas');
		canvas.width = img.width;
		canvas.height = img.height;
                if (canvas.getContext && canvas.toBlob) {
                    canvas.getContext('2d').drawImage(img, 0, 0, img.width, img.height);
                    canvas.toBlob(function (blob) {
                        $('#fileupload').fileupload('add', {files: [blob]});
                    }, "image/jpeg");
                }
            }
        });
    }
});
</script>

The code snippet above makes use of the canvas.toBlob polyfill, which is also used by the File Upload Image Processing plugin.

Due to the Same Origin policy, which also applies to the canvas element, it is not possible to load an image directly from another domain.
Therefore one of the requirements for the code snippet above is a server-side proxy to retrieve the image data: The $.getImageData library has to be included along with the jQuery File Upload libraries.

The example contains a hard-coded reference to the content type "image/jpeg", you will want to change this out depending on the image being uploaded. You could update your proxy server script to return the content type.