underdogishere

I've discovered that you cannot right click on a picture in Flickr and save it locally. (I'm talking about a photo that does not have the "All Sizes" option.) It looks like you can save it locally. The right-click menu appears. You can select "Save" on the right-click menu. The Save file dialog appears. Everything seems to go according to plan. Except... when you're done you have no picture (sing: yes, we have no pictures todaaay). Flickr has pulled a fast one.

Now, I understand why this should be so. I respect the principle of copyrights. A photo belongs to the photographer. I'm good with it.

But my Inner Geek didn't see it that way.

I think what upset my Inner Geek was that it appeared that the photo could be saved. That the save process worked. I mean, Flickr could have popped up a little message that said, "No no! Bad boy/girl/other! No download copyrighted material!" But it didn't. It tricked me -- and Inner Geek -- into thinking we were downloading a photo when we weren't. It made fools of us.

Now, I'm good with that. Don't get me wrong. I can live with looking like a fool.

But Inner Geek didn't see it that way.

Inner Geek's eyes got big and round and bulged and turned a bilious green. Red fire flew from Inner Geek's nostrils. Inner Geek's mouth twisted into a shape that resembled the outline of the Great Lakes. All of them.

"Calm down, Inner Geek!" I cried. "Calm down!"

Inner Geek did not calm down. Steam screaming out of his ears made fingernails scratching on a blackboard sound like Schubert. His bilious green eyes crossed.

"No, Inner Geek, don't! Don't do it!" I cried. (Because I knew what Inner Geek wanted to do.) "Don't do it, Inner Geek! It's wrong!"

But Inner Geek did it anyway.

What Inner Geek did was write a bookmarklet that, if executed on a Flickr page, will strip the photo out of the page so you can right-click and save it. Here's the bookmarklet:

javascript:a=document.getElementsByTagName("div");for(
n=0;n<a.length;n++){i=a[n];if(i.className==
"photoImgDiv")location=i.firstChild.src;}

To use this product of my Inner Geek's evil dementia, you need to create a Favorite or Bookmark (or whatever your browser calls it) with the above string as its target. Depending on your browser, you may be able to create a bookmark directly, or you may have to bookmark an innocent and unsuspecting Web page (like this one) and then edit the bookmark's properties to change the target. Make sure you get the whole thing (it starts with javascript: and ends with src;}) with no embedded spaces and all on one line. Also, if you copied-and-pasted from above, make sure you have a less-than sign, not an <, between the n and the a.length. (I apologize for that, but HTML does not like less-than signs.)

Next, bring up a Flickr photo page (that doesn't have the "All Sizes" option -- you don't need this to save an All Sizes page), and pull down your Favorites/Bookmarks menu and click on the bookmarklet. The Flickr stuff will disappear, the picture will be by itself, and you'll be able to right-click on the picture and save. For real.

If you have any questions or problems, Inner Geek will try to provide tech support via this post's Comments.

But remember, photos are copyrighted material and belong to the phtographer.

And pray for my Inner Geek's soul.

Labels: Inner Geek