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Flickr to Protect Orginal Sized Photos
Daily Ink
Stored in: Flickr News
Posted On: January 22 2007
By: Bryan Partington
Archival Photo
Flickr has had a highly misleading "Allowing Downloads" functionality for some time now. I call it misleading because this preference implies the ability to prevent people from downloading your photographs, when it does no such thing. Instead the preference merely removes the links to the larger versions of the photo, while still allowing the links to the larger file to be easily reconstructed.
For instance, if I have the url for the flickr thumbnail, like this:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/362951032_28d08df28b_t.jpg
I can easily download the 'original size' file merely by changing the letter on the end of the url:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/362951032_28d08df28b_o.jpg
In fact, there are greasemonkey scripts that automate the process quite effectively. By adding links to the original sized image back into every photo page on flickr, these scripts are able to completely ignore a user's "allowing downloads" settings. Over the years, this profound weakness in flickr's photo url structure has made many users justifiably upset and feeling that flickr had mislead them into a false sense of security.
It seems like all of this is about to change.
Flickr's API documentation has been rewritten to reflect this future change, where an additional "original secret" number will be added the the file names of 'original sized' photos on flickr. Take a gander at http://www.flickr.com/services/api/misc.urls.html, which outlines changes to the url structure of flickr image files. This will create virtually impenetrable protection for original sized photos even when the photo is set to a fully public privacy setting.
This is a good thing.
There have always been hacks for protecting one's original sized files on flickr, but they've involved uploading a fully public photo at low resolution and then uploading the original image at some other privacy setting. Needless to say, this process is something short of efficient, and any process that removes the need for it will be welcome.
6 comments on this Ink
On January 22, 2007, Stephanie Fysh said ...
Very nice! A good thing indeed.
On January 22, 2007, Lori Hale Williams said ...
I wonder if this will affect my fav plug in- the emorate photo commenting tool.
On January 22, 2007, Bryan Partington said ...
"I wonder if this will affect my fav plug in- the emorate photo commenting tool."
it shouldn't effect it unless that tool attempts to display or link to the original sized image - and even then nothing should break other than getting a 'photo not found' page after clicking the link, or displaying a broken image if you attempt to republish the original sized image.
all other image sizes would be unaffected.
so long as you're only using "emorate" for the 'normal' or 'large' sizes, you shouldn't notice the changes at all.
On January 24, 2007, Brenda Anderson said ...
I was interested to see that the author of the "All-Sizes+" greasemonkey script just released an update that changed the script to honor account settings and no longer show the All-Sizes button if the owner has disallowed it through the Flickr settings.
On January 24, 2007, Blue . said ...
this sounds like a great move, an improvement in security at least. I also wonder what other catches there may be, such as my links set with jd's flickr toys' viewed on black option?
On January 24, 2007, Jennifer T said ...
This is a giant leap for flickr in terms of giving back to its users control over their own images and how they choose to share them. I can only hope the next big security improvement will be to selectively allow API searches rather than the "all or nothing" situation that currently exists.
Otherwise, in Flickr News:
- Previously: TagMaps
Utata Ink is a daily publication edited by Bryan Partington (striatic). Photos used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and obtained via the flickr API unless otherwise noted. To make a contribution to Ink, please visit Ink Me.
