Download pictures from HootSuite: Ow.ly

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. Ha ha, I win HootSuite…  When you save the photo, the file type is defaulted to a .gif.  Go ahead and save it as a .gif.  When I did this earlier, I tried opening my picture, but it didn’t display my photo…  Did HootSuite one-up me again?!?  Absolutely not!  Right click that .gif file and select edit.  This will open the picture up in MSPaint.  Then simply save this photo as a .jpeg or .jpg.  Congratulations, you now own your digital media…. again!

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.

Creating custom background for Twitter using Twitbacks.com


Thanks for the great link Stacy Kinney. Twitbacks looked interesting so I obliged. The whole process took about 2 minutes from start to finish. The outcome was better than what I thought it would be. My Twitter background looks nice now @remymaza. The ability to create a custom message on the left side is neat. Also, you are able to fill out a message (up to 250 characters) and upload a logo/picture (2 MB limit) of whatever you like. The background you can also customize with your own image or select from one of the templates. This service is completely free unless you want to add more functionality.
Some of the options that cost money are:

1. Removing the twitbacks logo
2. Adding promotion services to your Twitter account – More Info

Twitbacks does say that there will always be a free service, let’s see what kind of innovations they can bring to the table. So far I really only see services that are geared towards businesses that are using Twitter as a marketing platform. All in all, this was completely worth my time and yours too.