For some reason Flickr - they should know better as good coders - have decided to be cute and try to prevent downloading of some images. Photographers probably requested the feature so much that Flickr went against their better judgement and coded this hack. We get this kind of silly request from clients all the time: "I want a website where no one can copy any of my content ever."
If you don't want people to be able to copy your content, don't put it on the internet, people.
Flickr, given that they have some good coders working for them, came up with an anti-download hack a little bit better than the standard no save on right click which is easily defeated by just pressing the spacebar or disabling javascript.
The Flickr trick is CSS based and consists of a div which carries the style classes "facade-of-protection" and a div called "spaceball". Basically Flickr is putting the image behind an empty div so you can't get at it with your mouse to save it.
In this case, "Disable Javascript" won't get you access to the image. It's being hidden by CSS. On the other hand, "Disable Styles" i.e. CSS will.
In Safari, if you enable the "Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar" option in advanced settings you will get a nice new menu. Here's where to enable "Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar":
Safari Advanced Options Enable Developer Menu
And here's what the Develop menu offers: an option to Disable Styles.
Safari Developer Menu with Disable Styles option
Here's how a Flickr protected large image page might look like before:
Flickr protected image before disable style
(no lightbox effect on these screenshots as this image belongs
to David Pogue and is only used as an illustration)
And here is what a right click on the image above would yield: no way to save, view or download the image.
Flickr right click options before disable styles in Safari
If you select "Disable Styles" and then open the Flickr address in a new window, the Flickr page should now look like this:
Flickr protected image after disable style
(no lightbox effect on these screenshots as this image belongs
to David Pogue and is only used as an illustration)
Now you just have to move your mouse over the image and right click and you can download the image or copy it or open it in a new tab:
right click image options after disable styles
This technique also works in Firefox. First install the Web Developers Toolbar to get a way to easily disable styles. Then disable styles via shift-command S or via menu.
Firefox disable styles Web Developers Toolbar
After that you can view, copy or save the Flickr protected image.
Flickr right click options before disable styles in Safari
Keep in mind that being able to save an image does not change the situation in terms of copyright. Copyright remains with the photographer or image owner.
In my case, I just wanted to have a look at Pogue's EXIF for his low light image from his Canon S95 demo folder, linked to from his "Love Letter to a Camera".
Unfortunately, when opened up in Preview, these versions do not contain any EXIF info. (David, if you ever do find this how to, I'd still really like to see that EXIF: I'm guessing the lens is at about at 2.5 aperture, the ISO is 400 and the length of exposure is about 1/30 second.)
As it took a little bit too long to figure this out (disabling the Flickr download disable), I want to make sure other people don't have to waste their time to be able to save Flickr photos.
Remember: if you don't want people to look at, share or save your work, there's a much simpler technical solution. Just don't put it on the internet.
This post is an alternative method to the relatively painful AdBlock Flickr technique from August this year. Thanks to Dave for the description of how Flickr's image hiding works. If you really want to download a lot of Flickr images often, the AdBlock technique might be worth the trouble.
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You can also right-click on the image and choose the ‘Inspect Element’ in the contextual menu on the regular Flickr page, then drag the image from the panel that pops up to your hard drive.
Nice solution. It looks simpler than screen grab followed by “stitch photos together” using a 3rd party app. I was surprised the Flickr hack prevented the image appearing if you do a “print to PDF”, but your explanation elucidates why that should be the case.
Thanks for teaching the people how to stil! shame on you!
A pity we can’t teach people how to spell, Venus.
If you don’t want people to be able to save your images or your writing to enjoy later, don’t put them on the web.
A photographer should be flattered that someone likes his or her images enough to save them for reviewing later.
Perhaps you missed this paragraph:
Happy New Year!
Nice. Thanks, now I don’t have to waste a couple of hours figuring it out myself! I was just trying to print a copy for my son to make sketches of medieval tapestries, all of which seem to be copyrighted, annoyingly enough.
Alec this post is BS and you know it, and your justification is total BS. Take this down
Hi John,
Pictures of Medieval tapestries as above cannot be legally copyrighted by the photographer in most jurisdiction (they are copies of existing art work).
I very well might want to keep a local gallery for my own enjoyment and in fact do. The internet is ephemeral.
Go kiss Eric Schmidt’s backside when you find time. One rule for everyone else, another rule for Google (on copyright, privacy, etc.).
It’s my computer and I’ll do what I want with it. Don’t want to share your images? Don’t put them on the internet.
Making the web work for you, Alec
Thanks so much! I came across a few pictures of myself, and couldn’t get ahold of the photographer to send them to me, so this was awesome. Can’t thank you enough
Thank you so much, you helped me to save loads of glorious photos for wellness……
@Alec,
Well if I ever find my images on display at your ‘local gallery’, I’ll be sending you a bill.
Photographers upload photos to sell as stock images that’s why they don’t want you to download them. They are on display, they are not there to be downloaded for free.
What you’re really saying in the article is that just because it’s on display on the internet, it’s free for the public to get a copy for themselves.
Do you go to shops and steal items on display?
Hi Ramone,
I think you are overreacting here. Copyright law hasn’t changed: copyright on the images still belongs to you. Whether someone has to do screenshots or right click makes no difference.
And for what it’s worth, I take a lot of pictures outside – of billboards for instance or art – which are perfectly legal to take for private use. If I tried to republish this art work, I’d run into issues.
I suggest you take an IP lawyer out to lunch (your dime) sometime and have him or her explain to you the limitations of copyright.
Then I’d suggest you pour yourself a nice glass of claret and relax in the evenings, content in the thought that someone somewhere is enjoying looking at the small online images which they were able to save to a folder of favorite images.
The same person is exponentially more likely to buy the full resolution version of your image or a photographer’s published book than someone who saw your image and was unable to save it.
Thanks, I was trying to get racing pics that a local racetrack photographer posts so people can let him know which ones they want to order, and now I can copy them for free and get them printed myself. He may quit being the track photographer if everyone does it and his time photographing and editing are wasted, but so what, at least I get what I want for free.
Mr. pc, please enjoy the song ‘Everything is Free’ by Gillian Welch (you can listen to it for free at grooveshark.com, BTW). This method of saving Flickr pictures was not posted to promote stealing images, but obviously that’s what you thought of instantly and graced us with you hilarious sarcasm. Well, I guess ‘hilarious’ is being a bit kind…
Hello PC/Racetrack Photographer,
If you are happy printing low res crappy copies of the racetrack photos, you are unlikely to be the person who would pay for high quality prints or for the full res digital negative.
I’d suggest you focus on your photography and the quality of your prints and on your marketing and spend less time worrying about putting the digital genie back in the bottle.
If you want to succeed as a race photographer, that is.
Making the web work for you, Alec
This may be new since your article was published, but today I tried for the first time to download a picture from Flickr and discovered it wasn’t possible. (Firefox).
I used your first method, which gave me a 105k reasonable image on my hard drive.
I then clicked on the image which took me to a black background display of the same image with a choice in the top right of “View all sizes.” Clicking this took me to another page with the option:
Download the Original size of this photo.
I did so, and got a 268k image, *complete with EXIF information.*
Hope this helps.
With Firefox Tools > Page Info > Media > Scroll till you find the image > Rightclick > Copy works but with Maxthon it’s even easier. Click ‘Resource Sniffer’ on the tool bar and just save anything you want.
thanks for your support
Alec, thank you so much for your tip. I guess some folks just don’t understand that the whole concept of the Internet is information sharing, whether it’s grandma’s chocolate cookie recipe or someone’s vacation picture to Hawaii. Don’t put stuff online if you do not want others to see.
why the image is small?
pls help me download pictures from this URL:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialchelseafc/sets/72157629820664598/show/
thank you
used Google chrome all I did was Inspect Element copy image URL paste in new window and saved image as!!!
Right click anywhere > view page info > select media tab > scroll until you see image you want > click save as button > done.
Alec,
I completely understand your reasoning for downloading copyrighted images for free. I have my own simpler way of copying protected Flickr images. I only use the copied images as wallpaper on my computer at work. I enjoy the image for a few weeks and then I seek out another. I also save them in a folder in case I ever want to purchase the image for a large print for my collection. My method is simple: I find the image I like on Flickr and copy the tag words used into a Google image search; (the image I want is typically within the first few results) then I select the image and Google shows me the picture in their preview screen where I then right click and hit save as. This doesn’t always work b/c sometimes Google automatically takes me to the page w/o giving me an opportunity to right click. If that happens, I just find another image I like and try again. It typically works within a couple tries but it does take some patience to find an image that works. Also, the image is always pretty low res so I couldn’t print it out any bigger than a wallet size even if I wanted to.
Your posts make a lot of sense and I enjoyed reading them. Photographers need to realize that the Internet is a blessing and a curse- your images reach people in every corner of the world but some of those people will steal your work. If you want to seize the opportunity to expand your customer base with the web, then you have to come to terms with the risks involved- same as every other risk/reward situation in the business world. That’s just the way it is. Once you make peace with that, you’ll be a happier person and probably a better business operator, as well. Of course you want to take steps to limit your vulnerability to those risks but you certainly shouldn’t lose sleep over it or feel bitter about it.
Thanks so much. The instructions you posted and the comments made it simple to save what Flickr tried to make difficult. :-)
The technique I use works perfectly in firefox (for any site – I use it at Pbase aswell). I right click anywhere on the page and click view page info, switch over to the Media tab, and skim through the list for the link that ends in .jpg or whatever, click that and then it shows the full size image in all its glory and you can save the image, or even take the URL for hotlinking for things like reblogging on tumblr.
I’m sure this is possible in other browsers, just in a different way, and I haven’t looked into it myself, but personally, I find this much easier than disabling and reloading a page, and whatever other nonsense.
Think what you want about people who post pictures, scrape pictures, etc. As someone who want to post pictures AND retain copyright, AND perhaps even make a sale some day, I’m grateful to Alec for POSTING what he found rather than keeping it to himself and using it.
I do some events and the organisers use Flickr for photos,I usually can find some but never seem to be able to actually get them though we are told they are free.Its probably me cause I’m not very good but in laymans terms how do Ia get that image from the Flickr site on my pc or iPad into my photos,many thanks for any advice
Dean
Hi Dean,
The instructions above are pretty clear. On the other hand, if you are using these photos for presentations, you better be very sure they are indeed Creative Commons or free for distribution.
Downloading pictures for your private use is pretty much at your own discretion despite the intimidating and desperate cries of authority freaks like Jim above. Or inclusion of said photos in an article about the photos themselves as illustration is also fair use.
Presentation use is another matter altogether.
How can you do this on Chrome?
Thanks that’s just so helpful for those who are too poor to afford a mac
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Hi Jess,
Love your ASCII art but the above steps will work just fine on Safari on Windows. Try this command:
C:\"Program Files"\Safari\Safari.exe /enableDebugMenuFirefox with Web Developer Toolbar let’s you do the same thing on Linux or Windows.
So you can take that finger of yours and put it in your…
ears to clean out the wax accumulating between both ends.
Thanks so much for the solution. What you say is exactly right. If you want to sleep with your precious photos under your pillow don’t post them on net. One has to be really innocent to think that people won’t be able to figure out ways to download pics off the net.
I admit I didn’t read carefully through the endless rating in the comments afterwards to see if this has already been mentioned, so apologies if I’m repeating. But anyway, I noticed you said that what you REALLY wanted was the EXIF information from the photo, and, no, the save-as will not get you that version of the photo.
What you want is to simulate Flickr’s “download” feature, and this is simple to do. After you load the page containing the size of the photo you want, use your browser–any browser, on any platform–to do “view page source.” ” This will give you the HTML for the photo’s page. Search for “spaceball.” In the line immediately under that is the URL to the photo. Copy it into your browser’s address bar, and add “_d” just before the .jpg.
I see the NYT columnist has deleted the photo in question, but I’ll use an example of something that isn’t even protected to demonstrate the URL:
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7241/7248992138_f5e44fc62c_o_d.jpg
Will download you a nice picture of a section of the Bayeux Tapestry. Note the _d before the .jpg. Without that, you will just get the picture in your browser. It will have the complete EXIF info available (though there isn’t much on that particular photo).
As for the “copyright” stuff, I note that on Flickr’s own FAQ (or some other similar user guide) they warn that while they make it difficult to download photos, it can still be done. They are up-front about this. The truth is the photo, even if it’s made hard to save via the spaceball, is still in your browser’s cache. So it’s already on your hard drive.
The key to the copyright is to NOT use it inappropriately. Where photogs have a legitimate complaint about this is when they start seeing their work on other websites without attribution or remuneration. In my experience though the only people who have to worry about this is people who take pictures of women. They don’t have to be pornographic–they can just be women playing volleyball, for example–and voila, it shows up on some d-bag’s pay-to-play website like “Volleybutts.com” or somesuch. The key is to just go after these scumbags, though I know that takes time and can be hard, since they all operate in loosey-goosey countries where rules don’t matter.
THANK YOU! such a simple solution to a pain in my ass for months now… I don’t know why I didn’t look this up before. Love your comment about if you want something to be private then do not put them up on the internet… Now I can have all the ferrari photos I want!!!
Jawkesh, that wasn’t the idea (pirating). Please be sure to at least properly credit the people whose photos you are republishing.
I do not have google chrome, I have internet explorer 8. How can this be done using that web browser? I ask you instead of endlessly trolling google because you seem competent, knowledgable and able to withstand bad spelling, criticism and some hysteria over copyrighting ;p. And yes I am one of those people who download pics for reference in future renovation and home decor ideas with the web addy so I can buy the quality image later. Silver lining on the cloud.
Hi Jessica,
Thanks for your question.
Chromium is free. Or you can do this with Safari or Firefox (also both free).
If anyone knows how to apply this technique in IE8, please let us know. I’m mainly a Mac user.
Thank you for taking your time to help us.
And STFU to those who B**tch about you and your blog. I bet most of their images are sucks as their sad life. Any smart photographer would be aware of internet threats before post their work online. And you must be too dumb to post full size image on flickr. Enough said.
Go Internet Trolls go away.. live your sad life.
Thank you VERY MUCH!!!!
Thanks very much! Learn something about web design technique as well. Thanks.
Alec,
Just because somebody publishes a website featuring their photographs, does not give anyone a license to steal. I have no problem with somebody downloading my images for personal, non-commercial use. However, once somebody publishes somebody else’s images on their website without the photographer’s permission, they’ve crossed the line. There is no 100% way to prevent somebody from downloading an image, but you can make it more difficult for them to do so via overlays, watermarks, etc. A lot of unscrupulous people out there. It’s a shame that we have to resort to these tactics, but such is a drawback of the Web.
Thanks for stopping by Steve.
With overlays, watermarks (unless they are very discreet), the only person whose work you damage is your own by damaging the enjoyment of the end user. Anyone with any technical skills can get around almost any so-called “safeguard”.
Anyone who uses your images commercially without permission makes himself or herself eligible to be sued.
The thugs at Getty Images are even making a big business of it, buying up Creative Commons portfolios and then beginning to sue based on an after the fact license change.
You can also right click on the image. Go to inspect Element. Copy the url near >img. Go to the url and the picture should pop up, this time unprotected by any code. Now you can right click and save.