What Do You Get When You Drag and Drop a PNG File From Finder Into an NSTextView?

In short: Image file drag and drop does only produce file URLs, either with security scope-able bookmarks or plain file paths. Dragging an image file from Finder onto an NSTextView will trigger performDragOperation(_:). You get access to NSDraggingInfo there and can inspect available content. Its draggingPasteboard (shortened to pb here) contains the following data when executed on macOS 12 Monterey:

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Using Drag and Drop with NSTableView

Nate Thompson compiled a tutorial on how to implement drag & drop in NSTableView. It’s a good read.

I remember how weird it felt to implement this the first time. Drag & drop is actually realized via the pasteboard. So it’s more like cut and paste with a visual representation. From this you get the ability to put multiple content representations into the pasteboard at once, so the drop container can decide how to handle whatever it receives.