Helpful Tip: Remove Flickr Spaceball.gif in Firefox and Opera

September 28th, 2007

14 Comments Written by Ryan

Flickr Spaceball GIF One of the things you may have noticed with Flickr is that the photos will have another image overlaid on top of them called spaceball.gif (here is an example photo) This prevents you from copying the address to the image or being able to save it to your computer. If you try to save spaceball.gif to your computer all you’ll get is a 1×1 pixel image that has no content to it.

Today we’re going to show you how to remove the spaceball.gif overlay image on Flickr photos. It’s pretty easy to do in both Firefox and Opera…

–How do I Remove Spaceball.gif in Firefox?–

Install the Stylish extension if you haven’t done so already.
Create a new Style by right-clicking on the Status Bar icon.
Add whatever description you would like, but in the content area paste this:

@-moz-document domain(flickr.com) { img[src*="spaceball.gif"] {display:none !important;} }

–How do I Remove Spaceball.gif in Opera?–

Go to Tools -> Advanced -> Blocked Content, and press the Add button.
Add this as the URL to block:

*flickr.com/images/spaceball.gif

Thanks to the anonymous tipster who sent this in!

This is just one of the many helpful tips that we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our Helpful Tips category, or by subscribing to our Helpful Tips feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!

Tags: Helpful Tips, Web Sites, Blocked Websites, Firefox Tweaks, Flickr, How To, Opera, Tips And Tricks

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September 28th, 2007 at 4:34 pm Max (All-Star)

When I pasted into Stylish, I get this:

This style has problems that may prevent it from working: Expected ‘]’ to terminate attribute selector but found “. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector. Do you want to use this code anyway?

[Use this code as is] [Edit the code further]

Are you sure that’s the right code? I tried on that Flickr example page and it didn’t do anything. By the way, why do these images have a spaceball.gif overlay? Do all images have it? How does Flickr decide which images do have the .gif overlay?
September 28th, 2007 at 5:21 pm JK

to download ANY image on a web page, use the Web Developer extension…
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

then…
right click > Web Developer > Images > View Image Information
September 28th, 2007 at 6:56 pm The Guru (All-Star)

@Max same issue I ran into as well.
September 28th, 2007 at 8:30 pm Dave

If you can block spaceball.gif using Block Content in Opera then you can do the same with Firefox and Adblock Plus

No need for the stylish extension
September 28th, 2007 at 9:37 pm Max (All-Star)

I played around with the code a bit and now it works. Here’s what I have:

@-moz-document domain(flickr.com) {
img[src*="/images/spaceball.gif"] {display:none !important;}
}

One thing I noticed was the src wasn’t the full /images/spaceball.gif. I changed it to that and I also changed the quotes. The code had quotes like this ” but I used ” and it works. One of those things did it.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm Ryan (Author)

Max wrote:

When I pasted into Stylish, I get this:

This style has problems that may prevent it from working: Expected ‘]’ to terminate attribute selector but found “. Ruleset ignored due to bad selector. Do you want to use this code anyway?

[Use this code as is] [Edit the code further]

Go ahead and try it now, the problem was that the quotes around “spaceball.gif” were the fancy curly smart quotes that WordPress loves to do, and Stylish doesn’t recognize it.

Dave wrote:

If you can block spaceball.gif using Block Content in Opera then you can do the same with Firefox and Adblock Plus

No need for the stylish extension

I do realize that, but I know more people who have Stylish installed than have Adblock installed, so I figured that would be the more common route.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:52 am Pieter (All-Star)

Or you could just add http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.c.....ceball.gif to your Adblock blacklist. That method doesn’t require additional tweaking if you’ve already installed Adblock.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:23 am Richard

Pieter wrote:

Or you could just add http://l.yimg.com/www.flickr.c.....ceball.gif to your Adblock blacklist. That method doesn’t require additional tweaking if you’ve already installed Adblock.

That’s cleaver and it works the easiest
September 29th, 2007 at 1:14 pm netster007x (All-Star)

What do you know, Opera will let you do it without any extra installation.

Off topic- Hey Ryan, in Opera Desktop Team blog posts, when the post the latest Kestrel builds (they did so, there’s a “windows” installer, and a “windows classic” installer. What’s the difference?
September 29th, 2007 at 5:05 pm Anonymous

Or simply view source in any browser.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:32 pm Ryan (Author)

netster007x wrote:

Off topic- Hey Ryan, in Opera Desktop Team blog posts, when the post the latest Kestrel builds (they did so, there’s a “windows” installer, and a “windows classic” installer. What’s the difference?

There is the MSI (Microsoft Installer) and the Windows Classic one. The MSI is supposed to be more geared towards Windows, and it supposed to keep track of changes better (I think).

Anonymous wrote:

Or simply view source in any browser.

You could do that, but it might be a bit tedious if you have to do it frequently.
May 6th, 2008 at 7:36 pm Hey Hey

Look at the criminals. Well guess what. You made the list .. hehehe.