500px images

Update.-- Trying this method recently I found doesn't work if the photographer has "protected" his images, meaning the right click produces a message it's protected. Well, it's not, because if you open the source code you can use the find command to look for the word "protect" just past halfway down the page of code, just above the title of the image, and there is the nice, neat, full URL for the image to cut and paste, with no backslashes to remove.

Original Post.-- If you find yourself looking at images on 500px.com and find the right click to save the image is disabled, fear not, as there's a simple way to extract the image file from the Web page to display on a Web page where you can save it to your computer. And pray tell what it the way?

It's simple. First you view the source code by either using the developer menu bar choice to Show Page Source on Safari (or it's equivalent with your browser) or use an extension (I use BetterSource available on Apple's Safari Extension server) to view the source code.

Then search the source code for "jpg" where you'll see a long line of code with of lots of URL's ending in ".jpg". Find the one with the largest last number (eg., 1024 or 2048) before the ".jpg". Copy the full URL (https...jpg) and paste it in the URL box for a Web page, but do not hit the return or enter because it won't work.

You have to edit the URL to remove all the backslashes, "\", in the URL, keeping all the forward slashes, When done, hit return and the image should display in the Web you can then use save, save as, or right click to download the image.

This seems to be part of the way 500px hides images from most people to easily download them, aka protect them, but that's impossible on the Web unless you use a sophisticated algorithim to name image files, use multiple servers, use scripts, or image slicing, but all those methods only take longer to sort through and get the image file.

In short, you can't hide images, so don't try except for the obvious people who want a quick way to steal images, but then Tumblr defeats them as Tumblr has little, if any, image protection for reposting images. 

This solution is if you want the higher resolution image some photographers post on 500px.com but only provide the lower resolution to Tumblr and other Website users. But not all post the higher resolution image so the images are all the same on 500px.

Anyway, it's what they do and here's how they do it.