flickr / google chrome

AnCatDubh

Well this evening Google chrome reported that it is now doing extensions so I had a mosey at what was available and there's an interesting little extension for flickr that allows you read/display the exif info, and points you to a thumbnail, small, medium, large, original .jpg url from a page thereby getting around the old spaceball problem. Hmnnnnn.....

BUT HERE IS THE CURIOUS / INTERESTING THING It is interesting, that it also digs deep into your flickr images and although the user has protected the size / restricted what is displayed - I can happily rob, steal, borrow, or as in my case NOT DO ANY OF THE AFOREMENTIONED, any size of image with the exception of the original which doesn't appear to be available consistently.

I can however get large format .JPG's of images from users photo streams that are not mine and that I think shouldn't be available to me.

If this behaviour doesn't have any other reasonable explanation then this is surely is a major hole in flickr's attempts at protecting your images??????

Is this known about??? I can't believe that I haven't come across it before. I knew about the spaceball thing, but had never come across this.

For me, it reinforces the issue of only upload to ANY online photo sharing site (be that flickr, pix.ie, photoshelter, etc.) a size image that you are happy to have displayed at some point in time.

I don't do much on flickr so it doesn't worry me too much from a personal stand point, but if I were a person that thought my flickr images were protected from prying eyes then I be taking them down and only uploading small formats.

Maybe i'm missing something...

EDIT: It's hard to know but on closer inspection, flickr's file naming conventions which the extension appears to be manipulating freely allows the behaviour that i'm seeing/reporting.

DaireQuinlan

Yes its well known, everything other than the original size is available by changing the image name slightly. The original size also used to be available but they changed that about 2 years ago.

smelltheglove

I'm glad I dont upload a large size but now I most probably will be reducing the size even further.