The Inner-workings of the Merc Mind
Okay, I’ve been holding on to this information for a little while now. Since I discovered that, even though I had thought I had protected MacMerc’s Flickr gallery from high resolution image download, high res images managed to find their way around the web. So this means I’m not the only one who knows about this.
“This” is the fact that in order for Flickr to be able to easily organize all the different sizes it creates for the images you upload, it has to catalog that image and all its sizes with the same number. That means the image you see here with this post… the image I have protected from being downloaded in its original high resolution form… it has the same code number as every other size Flickr created of it when it was uploaded. All you need to know is the difference between the standard gallery code number and the super large image code number. Well, here’s how you can see this image and any other on Flickr in high res:
Go to this image’s gallery page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickmacmerc/113045712/) and view the source. Find the word “spaceball” …this is the transparent gif that blocks you from downloading the image… in the line above the one containing “spaceball” you will see an img src tag with a URL in it that ends in “?v=0″… that is the actual URL of the image… copy that URL and paste it in a new window… delete the “?v=0″ and before the “.jpg” add “_o” and hit enter… this will load the original image. So in my highly classified ultra-protected Flickr gallery “http://static.flickr.com/54/113045712_0d375acf5f_o.jpg” will take you to the high resolution version of the one you see above.
After discovering how MacMerc’s images were being poached, I took off the download protection. It wasn’t doing any good and most of the images there are available elsewhere, people were just too lazy to find them the way I did. Well, now you know.
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I figured this one out myself quite some time ago.
Slightly easier for me is instead of using the URL above the spaceball placeholder is to look a bit lower for what amounts to the same URL but with the _t ending. That’s for the thumbnails. No need to delete any ?v=0 nonsense. Just change the _t to a _o for “original.”