Get Big Flickr Photos

(You might be interested in my more recent post on this, which has an easier way to get big Flickr photos.)

So you've been browsing through Flickr's Interestingness feature and found the perfect photo for your new desktop background. The only problem is, Flickr makes it hard for you to actually get the photo. Right-click on it and save, and you'll end up with spaceball.gif. Annoying. So here's how you get the real picture downloaded.

View Source for the page with the photo on it. The search for the term photoImgDiv. Immediately following this term is an <IMG> tag with a src value that looks something like this:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5.jpg?v=0

That is the link to the medium-sized image.  Select it, copy it, paste it into your browser's address field and go to it. (Select, Cmd T, Cmd L, Cmd V, Enter on Mac Firefox.) Note the question mark and everything after it is irrelevant. You only need the part up to and ending with .jpg.

Now comes the magic. In the address field at the end of the link, just before the .jpg, add _o which is an underscore and a lowercase o. Here's what the link will look like:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/1234/1234567890_a1b2c3d4e5_o.jpg

Press Enter to open it, and that will get you the original size of the picture. Now you can save it out to your computer.

This won't work for some pictures. In that case, try _b instead. This will get you the large (aka big) version of the picture. If neither of those work, then the medium size is the best you can do. _s is square, _t is thumbnail, and _m is small. But let's be honest here. What you're really after is the high resolution, no?

Now I just need someone to write a basic web service that takes a Flickr URL and returns the biggest version of the image. Any web hackers want to take this one on?

Of course doing a 2 minute web search turned up these existing instructions and this tool. Ah well, if it was new and useful to me, perhaps it will be to a few of you all as well.

Comments

[Mark]

This is an awesome tip- works like a charm- THANKS!

[Swami Charan]

Hi,

This does not work not. The secret key which is seen after the PhotoId for Large, Medium, Small sizes is the same. But if you want to view the Original Image, simply attaching '_o' does not work.

Now the secret key for Original Image is differnt. Original Image has got its own secret key.

I m trying on getting a way to get the key for Original Image... Meanwhile if u find a way, please do share with me...

Thanks
Swami