Download jpg's from browser

[Jason Brawner]

Our website contains many photos that users can retrieve. Currently they have to click on the thumbnail of their photo which opens a new browser window with their photo at full scale. Then they have to right-click -> Save as... to download.

Is it possible to tell the browser not to open the photo in the new window, but to prompt the open/save dialog when they click on the thumbnail? I'd like to do this without giving the file a wierd extension or zipping it. Is there an http header to set or am I out of luck?

Thanks,

Jason

[Bear Bibeault]

When the user clicks on the thumbnail, submit to a servlet that returns the full-size image as a byte stream with the appropriate content type set onto the response.

[Jason Brawner]

...but if I provide the appropriate content type (image/jpeg) won't the browser recognize it and display the photo rather than prompt for download? And if it did work, the user would be presented with a weird default file name (probably the servlet mapping) in the 'Save as' dialog. They'd have to be instucted to put a .jpg ext on the file before they saved it to their hard drive... too confusing for the average user.

Regardless, I will try it tomorrow.

Thanks

[Peter Bell]

You could always change the content type to something other than "image/...".

Alternatively: consider that most users don't expect clicking on images to download them. They expect to see them. And a good number of them would know what to do to save the image if they needed to.

[Jeroen Wenting]

refreshing change from the constant questions on how to PREVENT people from saving images displayed in their browsers

A good way that works is to serve the image in a format that browsers can't display.
BMP and TIFF are good examples (though there's no guarantee that there are no browsers at all that can't show them of course).

[Bear Bibeault]

Also set the 'content disposition' so that the browser knows that the response is a file (you can even name it) attachment. Search for 'content-disposition' for examples.

[Jason Brawner]

thanks for the ideas.... the only reason I need to investigate this approach is because a client wants their site to work this way, even though it is a bit silly.

Thanks,

Jason