LACIMA PixelDrop — Import Pixel Art into Photoshop Without Blurring

Pixel art goes into Photoshop blurry. This fixes it.

Drag an image file straight into a Photoshop document and it comes in through Place Embedded: a Smart Object, fitted to the canvas, interpolated. On photos nobody notices. On pixel art it's fatal — edges go soft, and Photoshop invents colours between your pixels.

The workaround everyone learns eventually is to open the image, copy it, and paste it into the document. That moves the pixels untouched. PixelDrop is that workaround, as one gesture.

1. Open the document you're working in.
2. Drag an image onto the panel.
3. It appears as a raster layer, original size, centred on whole-pixel coordinates. Nothing resampled, nothing anti-aliased.

Several images at once work fine. There is no dialog, and no import settings to get wrong.

Requirements

• Photoshop 2026 for the drag & drop itself — that's the version where UXP panels can receive files dropped from the desktop.
• On Photoshop 2023–2025 the drop won't fire, but the panel's click-to-pick button does exactly the same job, pixel for pixel.
• Windows tested. macOS should work — UXP is cross-platform and there's no OS-specific code in here — but it hasn't been tried on a Mac yet.

Free

No licence key, no account, nothing to activate. Use it in commercial work.

The panel follows Photoshop’s own language — English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Russian.

It's an early version: it does one thing, and does it properly. If you need it to do more, say so.

Three more, if they’re useful

• SpriteExporter — batch-export layers and groups as PNG, keeping canvas size and position so the files stay aligned with each other.
• NineSlicer — scale UI panels and frames to any size, corners staying crisp, the way game engines do it.
• SpriteSheet — layers to a sprite sheet and back again. Free as well, coming shortly.

The two paid ones cost the price of one together: the LACIMA Photoshop Tools bundle.

Who's behind this

I'm Francesco Clemente — I design UI and write sound and music for games, including Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, Placid Plastic Deck, Starsand, Lootborne and Slowly Sliding Duck.

I build these tools first of all to make my own work faster: PixelDrop exists because importing sprites into a mockup kept costing me a soft, ruined copy of artwork that was crisp a second earlier.

Every LACIMA tool is in active development. If something is missing or gets in your way, write to me — I read everything, and good ideas get built.

Support: hello@lacimatools.com