Disclaimer: Correct as of December 2017 and for modern browsers only.
TL;DR: Yes, now you can!
*if you have a dataTransfer or FileList object
Previously, programmatically changing the files input[type=file] field was disabled due to legacy security vulnerabilities, which are fixed on modern browsers.
The last of the major browsers (Firefox), has recently enabled us to set the files for the input file field. According to W3C testing, it seems that you can already do this on Google Chrome!
Relevant screenshot and text quoted from MDN:
You can set as well as get the value of HTMLInputElement.files in all modern browsers.
Source and browser compatibility, see MDN
The Firefox bugfix discussion thread has this demo you can test it out on, and here's the source if you want to edit it. For future reference in case this link dies, I will also include it as a runnable snippet below:
let target = document.documentElement;
let body = document.body;
let fileInput = document.querySelector('input');
target.addEventListener('dragover', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
body.classList.add('dragging');
});
target.addEventListener('dragleave', () => {
body.classList.remove('dragging');
});
target.addEventListener('drop', (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
body.classList.remove('dragging');
fileInput.files = e.dataTransfer.files;
});
body {
font-family: Roboto, sans-serif;
}
body.dragging::before {
content: "Drop the file(s) anywhere on this page";
position: fixed;
left: 0; width: 100%;
top: 0; height: 100%;
display: flex;
justify-content: center;
align-items: center;
font-size: 1.5em;
background-color: rgba(255, 255, 0, .3);
pointer-events: none;
}
button, input {
font-family: inherit;
}
a {
color: blue;
}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:400,400i,700" rel="stylesheet">
<title>JS Bin</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Drag and drop files into file input</h1>
<p><small>Supported in <a href="https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2861">WebKit and Blink</a>. To test, drag and drop one or more files from your operating system onto this page.</small></p>
<p>
<input type="file">
</p>
</body>
</html>
Important note:
You can only do this if you have an existing FileList OR dataTransfer object that you are able to set to the input file element (as the setter method DOES NOT accept plain text strings).
For further information, see Kaiido's answer here: How to set File objects and length property at FileList object where the files are also reflected at FormData object?
Now to answer your original question, it should be as simple as this:
document.querySelector('.preview-image-instruction')
.addEventListener('drop', (ev) => {
ev.preventDefault();
document.querySelector('.image-url').files = ev.dataTransfer.files;
});
