How do I save an image from the internet?
The internet is a very visual medium, and many people see images they’d like to save. This is a brief guide on how you can do it – and whether you should.
In other articles, we’ve discussed how you can save and maintain your own images (eg photos and illustrations) on the internet. You might also want to save some images that you’ve found on a website. There are a number of ways of doing so.
First a brief word of warning. If you’re considering putting images into a newsletter, onto your website or distributing them in any way, make sure that you have the permission of the copyright holder.
Permission to use image?
Images on websites like Flickr, which have the ‘Creative Commons’ attribute, are intended for you to download and use - as long as you acknowledge the original source. Others aren’t available for you to download in the same way. Photographers earn their living from their images, so if you take them and use them, it’s intellectual property theft.
So let’s assume there’s an image to which you have the rights, or whose owner is happy for you to use it. If it’s on a dedicated photo site, like Flickr, then click it. It will offer you a selection of sizes and you need to decide which size you want. Download by clicking the download button and your computer will ask where the image should be downloaded – maybe you could set up a folder on your desktop called ’Pictures’.
‘Copy’ or ‘save image as’?
Perhaps it’s a picture on a website that doesn’t have download options. How you download will depend on how much of it you want.
If it’s the whole web page you like, click “file” in your browser’s menu and then “save page as” – your computer will save the page with whatever title you choose. If it’s just the picture you want, use the right mouse button to click on it (or command-click if you have a Mac) and you’ll get a mini-menu in which one of the options will be “copy image” and another “save image as”.
If you just want to copy it to a document, then by all means use “copy image” otherwise “save image as” will offer you a choice of locations on your computer and you can rename it so that you can remember what it was.
You can also save the location on the web. This will let you can go back and look at the image without copying it, as long as the original site is still there.
Guy Clapperton
Guy Clapperton is a journalist specialising in writing about technology as well as small business for several major broadsheets. He broadcasts occasionally on BBC Radio stations and reviews the newspapers on the BBC News Channel.
