How to Save or Download Protected Images in Flickr / Orkut Album ?

A friend ( reader) was asking me “How to Save or Download Protected Images in flickr ?”. I myself faced a problem when I wanted to Save this nice Image for my stock photo Collections. I was Unable to do that as the image was protected . So I decided to Apply Some trick to get The Photo.

Normally, you can save Images/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 1×1 pixel placeholder image called spaceball.gif

Reason : 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.

Solution : You may either use the good-old Print Screen / Screenshot 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=” Link of Image “ tag just before the tag that encloses the spaceball image. (see screenshot)

Now all you have to Do is just get the Actual image Link and Download it … Happy Downloading…

You can also use this method to Download images from other image protected sites too.

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