Maybe you have noticed, maybe you haven’t, but when you send pictures to this service, you cannot download them from their website. Right click as much as you want, you’ll never get a Save Picture As option. That’s a major flaw in my book. I send pictures to the cloud not to lock them into a vault. I send them because I’d like to share them! These pictures are not yours HootSuite, they are mine and will always be mine!
What can you do about it?
Being the curious guy that I am, I noticed an embed link on the page. Let’s look at this one for example: http://ow.ly/i/65gE. Cracking open notepad, I pasted this link and saved the .txt file to a .htm. Upon opening the newly created web page, I see my beautiful picture with all of it’s glorious pixels. Well, it’s not that great of a photo, but the end result is gratifying. Since I’m now viewing a web page with MY photo on it, that isn’t controlled by HootSuite, I’m able to right click the page and Save Picture As. 
I OWN MY PHOTOS HOOTSUITE and it’s quite ridiculous that I have to resort to these tactics just to share my digital life. What if my friends or family wanted to download that photo? Give up the policy of what is yours is mine and what’s mine is mine. It’s so not attractive.
10 comments:
What browser were you using? With firefox, Tools/Page Info/Media shows the URL for the image as
http://static.ow.ly/photos/original/65gE.jpg and has a SaveAs button that downloads the image. Not my preferred browser, but an example of using browser specific page info to save an image that can not be saved w/ right click.
I had the same difficulty downloading an image from HootSuite and found your post that led me to try other browsers and gave firefox as an example. Thanks for the info.
Surprised that HootSuite does not allow the submitter to download their own image but understand that they might intend to allow others to view an image but not save a copy. Not clear from the Terms of Service if the failure to provide a right click save is intended to be a functional restriction on website users license to reproduce User Content.
It may have to do something with a hacky way to prevent a lawsuit, but if it's on the InterWebs, it'll always be able to be ripped off. Prime example posted above :P
Use adblock plus and block this URL:
http://static.ow.ly/4-9-19/js/owly.gz.js
Its the javascript code that prevents right clicking on the images.
Once its blocked you can save images normally.
Thanks for the tip! Hopefully this will help others in the future. Still ticks me off that you have to go through this just to download a picture.
Here's how I do it--and no special software or download is needed: From the ow.ly picture, click on "Full Image" (located to the right of the image and below the URL address). Copy/Paste the URL of the Full Image into your browser. Do not hit "enter" yet. You can see the picture's jpg embedded with a lot of code. Delete everything after "jpg" and everything before "http". For a larger image (if there is one), I replace "normal" with "original" in the URL. Hit "Enter" and then Right Click to View or Save Image. Good luck!
Thanks for the updated David!
When I wrote this, I don't believe your method was an option. You definitely have the best approach now, so thanks for sharing.
Cheers,
Matt
Like a boss! Well played sir.
FireFox, Tools, Page Info, download the content.
Post a Comment