Food for thought from TheHuey

Monkey See. I was poking around Flickr recently and was amazed at the amount of ‘Interesting Photos’ that users have tagged. Some of the sunsets and scenery photos are absolutely stunning. Naturally, I wanted to fetch and use it as my desktop background. However, (understandably) Flickr doesn’t like people downloading (or referring directly to the images) so they have gone to some lengths to obfuscate and hide the actual image url. If you try to right-click and copy image source, you get an annoying little image called spaceball.gif. How does Monkey get around this?

Monkey Do. Having recently downloaded and installed the GreaseMonkey plugin for FireFox, I searched and couldn’t find a suitable userscript to handle the situation. Being the obsessive type, I went ahead and wrote two quick scripts to help me get at the actual image urls. One, ‘Flickr Img Src Exposer‘, exposes the image url on an individual photo. It adds a link ‘IMG LINK’ underneath the image allowing for easy copying. The second script, ‘Flickr Download Links‘, works when you are exploring the last 7 days’ interesting photos. I got tired of clicking on each photo and then saving the image, so I put a ‘LINK’ under each photo in the page. Clicking on the link takes you to a gallery of all the available image sizes. You can click on the download link to get the image downloaded or copy the images source from the image displayed. The largest size may not be available and you’ll find out if so after clicking on it. I chose not to display the largest image size to save Flickr some bandwidth.

Monkey no get spaceball.gif. This has proved somewhat useful for me and I thought I’d share it with others. You can find the scripts on ‘http://userscripts.org‘.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under Technical Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.