And now there is Image Preview, a Firefox add-on that does exactly what I requested for so long. The Firefox extension will automatically display a larger version of the image on mouse over on the same screen. No new pages that need to be opened or loaded, which speeds up the workflow tremendously.

The extension displays a larger version of the image if the image itself links it. It does not work if the image links to another page on the website, which means that it does not work on sites like Flickr that display images on individual HTML pages.

It does work well on all sites that link to images directly, including most WordPress sites like Ghacks or popular image posting sites like 4chan. The extension displays a preview with a maximum resolution of 150 pixels in width or height by default, whichever is larger. This can be changed in the extension’s options to a custom resolution. A resolution of 0 will display all images in their original size.

Some users may find it irritating that image previews are displayed on mouse over. They can add the Ctrl key to the previews so that a mouse over alone will no longer show the image preview. The preview is only loaded if Ctrl is held down at the same time.

The remaining settings include configuring the position of the preview image on screen (either center of screen or near the mouse cursor), the display delay (500ms by default), whether to hide the image preview if the mouse cursor leaves the link area and if image information should be displayed with the preview.

These settings can be used to customize the extension further. The delay for instance is helpful when moving the cursor over images to reach other links or elements on the screen. Image previews would pop up all the time if you’d set the delay to 0.

Image Preview is a great Firefox extension to quickly display images in larger resolutions, provided that they are linked to. The developer should consider adding an option to zoom images if the image itself does not link to a larger version. Firefox users can download Image Preview from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The add-on adds one new entry to the context menu when hovering over images in the browser. It adds an option to view the image with Image Plus which basically is a basic image viewer right in the browser.

All image manipulation options are available on that page then. Some are available directly while others are accessible via the right-click context menu. Firefox users can zoom the image with their mouse wheel, and in smaller increments when the Shift key is pressed.

Other options include pressing 0 for the actual size of the image, f to fit the image to the current window, the arrow keys to pan the image and the scroll key to rotate the image.

Most of the options accessible through keys on the keyboard are also accessible by right-clicking on the image that is displayed in the browser. Here it is again possible to perform the following operations directly.

• Actual Size
• Fit To View
• Flip Horizontally
• Flip Vertically
• Rotate Left 90°
• Rotate Right 90°
• Reset Rotation
• Close View Image Plus

The major gripe that I have with the add-on is that it takes two clicks on the image first before the other image manipulation options become available. View Image Plus is available at the official Mozilla add-ons website.

Take the Ghacks logo for instance. You will notice that resizing the window in Firefox after loading the image will reduce the size of the image automatically; Firefox resizes the image dynamically.

If the browser window is large enough the image is shown in its original size.

If the browser window is resized, the image is resized dynamically as well.

Firefox has a configuration setting for that. To make the change enter about:config in the Firefox address bar. First time users need to click the I’ll be careful button.

Enter the parameter browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing in the filter list and double-click it to change the value from true to false. Firefox will dynamically resize images if the value is set to true. A value of false will show the images always in their original size regardless of the browser window size.

The change is enabled immediately. Open tabs need to be reloaded once for the change to become active though.

Why would someone want to make the change? It makes sense for very large images, that exceed the screen resolution. Users who want to view those images in their original size need to download them to the computer to do so, as Firefox resizes the images automatically. Making the preference change allows those users to view the images directly in the web browser.

Unlinker is a Firefox add-on that can display full images on the very same pages the image links or thumbnails have been posted thus eliminating the need to click on the images to view them in full resolution. There are two ways to make the add-on work after installation. It integrates itself in the right-click menu of the Firefox web browser. Users who want to view the full sized images on the active page may therefor right-click on that page and select the Unlinker option from the menu.

The second option is to customize one of the toolbars of the Firefox web browser and drag and drop the Unlinker add-on on one of them to be able to access the functionality with a left-click as well.

Unlinker is available for the Firefox web browser. It can be directly downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Image Navigator makes image browsing in Firefox comfortable. It is not the perfect solution and there surely will be some websites where the extension will fail to work properly. The reason for this is because Image Navigator is working with url sequences trying to find the next image or another folder containing images.

The extension adds one button to the Navigation Toolbar in Firefox which opens up a menu with two options that can also be selected with hotkeys. Next Image or Previous Image are the two choices offered. The hotkeys for those two functions are [ALT W] or [ALT Q].

Image Navigator prefetches the next image if one is found which means it only takes a fraction of a second usually to display the next image in line. The Firefox add-on is experimental meaning that it can only be downloaded after logging into the Mozilla website.

Update: Image Navigator has been discontinued. We suggest you take a look at the Image Tools extension instead which offers similar features and a lot more.

For anyone who wants to test the images in their browser, they are here and here. I was not able to come up with a solution yet, the second image was displaying fine after a few tries but it seems to be caught in an endless loading loop. The image is displayed completely but the loading bar is still loading something, not sure what it is. Saving the images and viewing them in Windows turns out to be working correctly.

A quick research seems to suggest that those images have been saved using CMYK encoding and not the usual RGB encoding. It turns out that Firefox is having problems displaying images that have been encoded this way and cannot display them properly, hence the error message The image [...] cannot be displayed, because it contains errors when trying to load such an image.