A DI reader wants to download a private picture from Flickr Photos that's blocked from downloading.
Normally, you can save pictures from Flickr (or any website) by right clicking the photograph and saying "Save Image As.." but in the case of protected Flickr images, all you will see on the desktop is a blank 1x1 pixel placeholder image called spaceball.gif
When a Flickr member has set download permissions to disallow his/her photos from being downloaded, a transparent image is overlaid on the actual photo so the right-click method fails.
You may either use the good-old Print Screen or any of the methods below to defeat the Flickr image protection:
For Firefox: Goto Tools -> Page Info -> Media - Scroll down until you see that Flickr image in the Media Preview Window. Click the Save As button.
In IE, Opera, Safari or Firefox: Right click the Flickr web page and chose "View HTML source" - now search for "spaceball.gif" in the HTML source. You'll find the full location of the protected image enclosed in the <img src=".."> tag just before the tag that encloses the spaceball image. (see screenshot)
Download Flickr Images in a Batch
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/08/download-flickr-photos-protected-by.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Using Adblock on transparent images mostly works well.
Written on 6/8/07 7:45 PM
Opera seems to rock in this attempt to download flickr images .
Just choose User mode ( which to defaults to Author mode ) in opera 's VIEW BAR .
Then simply right click and save the image .
u wont have the transparent image hack at all .
Thus opera easily comes over these protections :)
Written on 6/8/07 8:28 PM
There is an even simpler way: So simple - it's unbelievable. You just change the place where you right click to the absolute bottom of the image. Seriously.If you want to know why it seems to work, use the web developer extension for Firefox and outline all images, the spaceball image seems to lie at an offset of a couple of pixels from the bottom.
Written on 7/8/07 1:32 PM
yes Ashish..that was really unbelievable, but so simple...just right click on the bottommost edge of the image and save..!!
Written on 23/8/07 8:29 PM
hey thanks for the tip on getting pics with spaceball protection, firefox is my new best friend
Written on 23/9/07 4:59 AM