If you're interested in an amazing use of Flash and Flickr's API to navigate Flickr, check the Flickr Related Tag Browser. Simply beautiful, and amazing.

Sometimes I see beautiful pictures on Flickr (for example, this picture of Hyori at the beach) that I want to download, but cannot (because they've disabled it, and all I download is this blank image).

To get around this "protection," (and I'm assuming you're using Firefox, it's possible to do in IE just a bit more convoluted) simply select the image with your mouse (like you would highlight text). Then right click, and select "View Selection Source".

For the Hyori image, you'll get something like this:

<div id="photoImgDiv77559479" style="width: 502px;" class="photoImgDiv"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/36/77559479_e067029191.jpg?v=0" alt="" onload="show_notes_initially()" height="369" width="500"><img style="position: relative; top: -371px; margin-bottom: -371px; display: block;" src="/images/spaceball.gif" alt="" height="369" width="500"></div>

Find the src value that is *not* spaceball.gif; in this example:

<div id="photoImgDiv77559479" style="width: 502px;" class="photoImgDiv"><img src="http://static.flickr.com/36/77559479_e067029191.jpg?v=0" alt="" onload="show_notes_initially()" height="369" width="500"><img style="position: relative; top: -371px; margin-bottom: -371px; display: block;" src="/images/spaceball.gif" alt="" height="369" width="500"></div>

Copy and paste that value into your browser to get your file. However, that will only be the "web" size. If you want to get the full size, add a _b to the filename (before the extension).

In this case, if I wanted the full-sized image, it'd be: http://static.flickr.com/36/77559479_e067029191_b.jpg