Flickr hack: Download flickr’s protected photos with single click; no script, no extension

Flickr protects pictures by putting the transparent spaceball.gif on the photos to protect some from being downloaded. It’s been done by the users not wanting to publish their private photos. Normally, in firefox, you can right click on the photo, and then click on “Save Image As…” to save the picture. But with following the method above, you may com across with a 1×1 pixel picture.

By googling, you will find some solutions which let you bypass the space. For example by means of extensions or extra scripts and even firefox’s own menus. These tricks are a little bit time consuming and sometimes boring while you have opened some more pictures and do not want to move away from the page, or you are not at you own desk, or if you are a new web surfer. Just a single click in firefox and the photo is in your computer:

1. Open a download-protected flickr photo page. [example]
2. Press CTRL+A on the page to select everything.
3. If you look carefully on the very bottom of the photo, there you’ll see a blank-left space of spaceball.gif about 1mm.
4. Right click on that space and from the appeared menu click on “View Image”.
5. Now you can save the picture.

I, accidentally, ran into this bug of flickr and I have always succeeded. Give it try! That’s completely free.

Some other solutions:

• How to remove the flickr spaceball

• Flickr photo download HOWTO

• Download Flickr Photos Protected by Transparent spaceball.gif

• Flickr remove spaceball