Downloading images with Safari: puzzling

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
August 31st, 2003 • 9:37 pm

I must say the mechanism for downloading images from a web page in Safari is quite puzzling. First you LOAD the web page in Safari. If the page contains an image that’s fairly large, this can take a while on a modem connection.

Then you control-click on the image and you get the following three options:

image

If you choose “Download image to disk”, for some strange reason Safari connects to the web server and downloads the same image again a second time within its “Downloads” window!

Why can’t it just save a copy of the image that it has already loaded in the user’s Downloads folder?

The only way to avoid this unnecessary downloading process is to copy the image to the Clipboard instead, and then paste it INTO an empty image file in an image editor such as Photoshop. Not very convenient! (Another way is to drag the image from the web page and DROP it on the Desktop or in a folder window that’s open in the Finder.)

Quite puzzling. What the user expects in this contextual menu is a “Save image to disk…” command which would open a “Save As…” dialog box and let him/her rename the file and manually choose the destination, and then would immediately save a copy of the already-downloaded file in the selected destination folder.


2 Responses to “Downloading images with Safari: puzzling”

  1. YumYum says:

    This has annoyed me to no end. If you try to save/download some images from certain sites (like comics) what you end up downloading is a placeholder gif and not the image itself. Although that can be gotten around by using a screenshot utility, it’s far easier to use another browser. iCab is particularly powerful in this regard and lets you save all images, even background gifs.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Right. Very frustrating. People should NOT have to use a screenshot utility!

    I also end up using another browser (Camino in my case) when I encounter too many problems.

    PS: No need to use a fake email address when posting comments. Your email address will not appear anywhere on this site unless you specifically ask the system to show it. And it will NEVER be divulged, resold, or whatever.

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