Cannot move participant windows around anymore

Thanks for the detailed report — and for the very thoughtful use case behind it. Putting the active speaker directly under your camera so you appear to make eye contact is a great habit, and it's one we want to make sure you can keep using.The good news: the drag-and-drop feature has not been removed in 6.7.8. What you're seeing is almost always caused by one of a few states that automatically lock the gallery layout. Could you check the following, in order — the first one is by far the most common cause:
1. "Follow host's video order" is turned ON When this is on (either by you or by the meeting host), every participant's gallery order is locked and tiles cannot be dragged.

• At the top of the meeting window, click View → if you see a checkmark next to "Follow host's video order", click it once to turn it off.
• You may also see a menu item called "Release video order" — clicking that does the same thing.

2. A sort option is active under "Sort gallery by" Recent versions added a View → Sort gallery by submenu with options like First name (A‑Z), Last name, Entry time, etc. If any of these is selected, it overrides your manual order.

• Open View → Sort gallery by and make sure none of the sort options is selected. Once no sort rule is active, drag-and-drop is re-enabled.

3. Someone is pinned, spotlighted, or has their hand raised While any of these states is active, dragging is temporarily disabled to keep important participants in a fixed position.

• Use View → Remove all pins and Remove all spotlights, and ask raised hands to be lowered, then try dragging again.
• In ~9 out of 10 cases, step 1 resolves it immediately. If after going through all three you still cannot move tiles, please reply with:
• A screenshot of your View menu (fully expanded),
• Whether you're the host or a participant in those meetings,
• Your account email (so we can check your account-level meeting policies).

We hear your point about the discoverability problem — the in-app message that explains why a drag is blocked is too easy to miss, and we've already flagged it to the product team for improvement.Thanks again for sticking with Zoom since the pandemic — we appreciate it.

Thanks for your quick reply, Francis.  As you can see in the screenshot, “Follow host’s video order” is not checked, and neither are any of the “Sort gallery by” options checked, which rules out points 1 and 2.  As far as point 3 goes, I saw no “Remove all pins / Remove all spotlights” is not visible in my menu, and there were no hands raised.  Perhaps this is simply because there *were* no pins or spotlights to remove.

I’m the host for these meetings; I am NOT the account owner, however; it’s a group account to which I have access as one of many users.  I’ll have to check with the account owner to see if he’s okay with providing the account email.  If we can find no resolution for this, I’ll contact him and explain the problem, and hopefully he’ll either check the account settings himself, or provide me with the account email so we can pursue it further.

It’s not a *big* problem, it’s just a sudden change in the app’s behavior that I can’t explain (or rectify, thus far.) 

A couple of discoveries made while running several meetings: during the last meeting I hosted, I *was* able to relocate a window a few times, but I had to hold the window I wanted to move for several seconds before it would ‘take,’ and this stopped working altogether after moving a window two or three times.  Also, switching from “Gallery” view to some other view and then back to ‘gallery’ restored the ability to relocate a window normally (no long-hold), but this too stopped working after moving a few windows around.  This was repeatable for a few times.

Following a Windows update, a couple of driver updates and a reboot, the problem seems to have cleared up; I can move window locations without any issues whatever.

Thanks for the input!

Hi,

I noticed the same behavior after a recent update. In some cases, Zoom resets gallery view preferences or changes the way participant tiles can be arranged.

A few things you might want to check:

• Make sure you're in Gallery View rather than Speaker View.

• Look for any new participant sorting options that may be forcing an automatic arrangement.

• Try disabling any active sorting mode and see if manual dragging becomes available again.

• Sign out of Zoom and back in, or test with a different meeting to rule out a meeting-specific setting.

• If the issue started immediately after updating to 6.7.8, it could be a bug or an intentional UI change introduced in that version.

Since you've been using manual thumbnail positioning successfully for years, and it stopped suddenly without any changes on your end, I'd lean toward this being related to the recent update. If multiple users are experiencing the same issue, Zoom will likely need to address it in a future patch.

Has anyone else on 6.7.8 been able to manually rearrange participant thumbnails, or is the feature no longer available for them as well?