Renaming Photos

I don't know of a comprehensive solution to that problem, but I can second your interest in it. I ran into something similar a couple of years ago trying to display the PNG image from w3.org to brag that one of my pages on my ISP's server was valid HTML 4.

The problem seemed to have more to do with the browser than with the server, though. Some browsers rely on the image's filename extension to guess its MIME type, either because they can't do it any other way, or because doing it that way is an option in the browser's preference settings. Filename extensions on the server might not be the best solution, because it might make those browsers more vulnerable to trojans and viruses that run from IMG tags.

Interesting news about the browsers. I've been using Opera 7.5, and while it has no trouble displaying images from Scrapbook, it reads as HTML files any I save. There are a few other sites at which Opera shows the same behavior, but images from most sites it recognizes as being .jpg or .gif or whatever they actually are.

But it's annoying to have to go through the saved images from Scrapbook or one of the other sites of the same sort and tell my image viewer (Irfanview) to rename them with the correct file extension, one at a time. Sometimes I just use Firefox for fetching images from Scrapbook, though I'd rather just be able to get Opera to recognize them correctly.

I have Opera 7.54 installed on Windows 95 on another machine, so I checked it out. Mine does recognize the MIME types and can display them when I look up the image properties, and although the Save dialog defaults to HTML, it saves the images as image files, and without adding the wrong filename extension (but doesn't add the right one, either, even if I pull down the menu to deselect HTML :/).

For me, Opera has usually (going back at least as far as version 5 or so) seemed relatively good at noticing when a file used as the src attribute in an IMG tag wasn't really an image. As I recall, IE 4 was one that used to have a lot of trouble that way. Netscape 4 may have been another. I don't know how much of that has changed since, or in what ways. (I'm glad to see that the images will be accessible through links with filename extensions now; I'm just curious about whether that fix might open up a security hole for a few people whose browsers aren't very smart.)

There is a patch already committed to fix this, though I don't believe it has gone live yet. When it does...

http://pics.livejournal.com/mahlon/pic/000r7cfa/s640x480

can also be accessed as:

http://pics.livejournal.com/mahlon/pic/000r7cfa--s640x480.jpg

Can you please confirm that there are or are not typos in the "also be accessed" URL. Specifically, I'm wondering about the two dashes.

(yes, I understand that it doesn't work right now because the patch isn't live yet)

P.S. Nice cat.

I just tested it out and...

http://pics.livejournal.com/nostradamus427/pic/0013gaxr
http://pics.livejournal.com/nostradamus427/pic/0013gaxr.jpg

are the same pic, and all i did was add the .jpg // you have to be careful and add the "correct" ext. (i.e. i have some png's and gif's and jpg's and i don't know which pic is which, so i've to got to test it first.)

Hope that helps maybe...

using firefox 1.0.1