It would be good if you could drag the rectangular selection into another app.
I think something like ctrl-drag of a selection, and presumably on doing so it would create a temporary file of the selection content which would be what is actually dragged to the destination app. You would need some settings for the format and quality of this temporary file which could default to e.g. JPG 80% for lossy or unknown types and PNG 6 for lossless types. The temporary file would be cleaned up after a certain period (or when the destination app id is no longer existing).
Example usage scenarios - you take a photo of a beetle and when you open the picture you highlight the beetle and drag that selection into inaturalist to submit/identify. If dragged into an explorer-like program it would perform a move of the temporary file.
David
Drag selection to other app
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