How to avoid saving spaceball.gif at Flickr

Posted by Martin in Browsing, firefox, opera  Tags: , ,

29

Sep



Some images at Flickr are weakly protected with an image overlay called spaceball.gif. Whenever you right-click the image to save it you do save spaceball.gif instead which is a 1×1 pixel image showing nothing at all. The same happens if you try to drag the image to your desktop or hard drive.

However, if a photo is show it can be saved. The easiest way to achieve this is by blocking spaceball.gif from being loaded when visiting Flickr. You can do this in Firefox if you have the Adblock extension installed. When you are viewing an image at Flickr that you can’t save because of the spaceball.gif overlay you do the following to block the overlay.

Hit CTRL + SHIFT + B to open the list of blockable items. Navigate to the entry with spaceball.gif at the end and choose to block this item by right-clicking it. This prevents that spaceball.gif is loaded so that you can save any items at Flickr by right-clicking it.

Opera has a similar function. Just go to Tools > Advanced > Blocked Content and click Add in the menu. Paste the url *flickr.com/images/spaceball.gif into the new entry and close the menu.

via Cybernetnews


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17 Users Commented In This Post

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zoso says:

doesn’t quite work

Martin says:

it does work, please explain what you did and what is happening

Benóný (Iceland) says:

Is there no other way of doing this? I mean without using Adblock?

zoso says:

i got it banned, but it still loads.

Simon Templar says:

It would probably be a good idea to empty your browser cache before or after applying this hack.

Fast Update III « hardyweb:perjalanan hidupku™ says:

[...] ghacks ada post pasal bypass flicker punye spaceball . aku dah lama tulis pasal spaceball nih .. cuma aku punye artikel nih .. kena carik secara manual [...]

My Stuff says:

[...] ghacks: Some images at Flickr are weakly protected with an image overlay called spaceball.gif. Whenever [...]

Mutant says:

It really works.
Thanks,Martin!

Anti-Spaceball says:

WOW! It truly works. I didn’t realize that it could be this simple.

jose says:

opera also works!!!

renel says:

i cant make it work

can't believe !!! says:

are you trying to steal pictures from there ???
because this is not funny at all !!!
spaceball is to protect our own pictures !!!
shame !!!

why not says:

Works perfectly! Thanks….Regarding the previous comment which says “are you trying to steal pictures from there ???
because this is not funny at all !!!
spaceball is to protect our own pictures !!!
shame !!!”….Well…why does Flickr claim that “Share your photos…watch the world”. It’s supposed to be a “free site” to share photos.So where does the question of “stealing” comes?

ARX says:

Agreeing with the fella above: if you’re so into your photos not being downloaded by anyone, DON’T PUT THEM ONLINE. Simple. So get off the sanctimonious trip, and close your photo albums to the world.

easier says:
james says:

it worked perfectly. i’m going on a spree.

rome says:

thanks, really usefull.

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