Passwords and Images

I guess that posting links to images doesn't work too well if those images happen to be in a password protected directory... I'll fix that in a bit, but speaking of images that are tough to get your hands on... Flickr. One of the most helpful computer tips I have given a lot of my friends is how to pull images that are otherwise copyrighted off of that wonderful photo-sharing website.

Say you're looking for a picture of mountains, and you search it... one of the first results that comes up is this beautiful picture...

But right-click on it and try to save it and what do you get? Spaceball.gif... oh man, did I struggle with spaceball for a while. This is especially tough when you're doing an architecture project and all the best pictures of the building you're researching are like this. So here's how to get that image here...



It's very easy. On the flickr page with the image that you want to grab, right click in a blank area and hit "View Page Source". This will open up a new window with a bunch of html code that you most likely don't understand. What you're looking at is the guts of the page, and the image is in there somewhere. To find it, start by hitting "CTRL+F" (the 'find' command) and typing "spaceball" which is the thing it's putting over top of the image to keep you from getting to it. Once it finds spaceball, and there should only be one result, scroll horizontally left from it and you should see the URL of the image. It will look something like this...

<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/471756134_868a828b08.jpg?v=0" alt="Glass House Mountains by bridgepix." title="" width="500" height="333"

Now copy and past that URL into a new tab or window in your browser.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/471756134_868a828b08.jpg?v=0

Voila! Now you can right-click and save image as all you want...