The Thing What I Wrote

[andrewducker]

I spent the afternoon grappling with Javascript, writing my very first Firefox addon.

I repost images on Livejournal/Dreamwidth a lot, and I'm not the only one. And I've noticed that I tend to forgot the alt text (and title text) when I do that.

So what would be very handy is if I could right-click on an image and select "Copy Image Source" and get the image, complete with any information that was in the IMG tag.

And so I wrote one.

You can get it here if you think it would be useful.

And if you have any feedback on improvements to it, just let me know. It's trivially simple, but that doesn't mean I've missed something obvious that would make it better for some people.

Comments

[matgb]

Ooh, nice. I had a copy image source addon ages back, but it stopped being updated and died. Nice one.

Test:


Excellent.

[matgb]

Oh, one thing, no idea how, but it's right at the bottom of my now rather long context menu (need to trim some of that, especially bad for images that are links), being able to move it, or just have it appear with the rest of the copy/edit stuff would be good. It must be possible, because COLT appears there.

[andrewducker]

Looks like that's something that you can do with a fullon addon, but not with a Jetpack one. Which is a shame, because Jetpack ones look to be easier to write, and don't require installation.

I'm looking at this documentation and not seeing anything useful for that.

[simont]

I idly wonder if it might be a good idea to have it default to also pasting a line of text after the image saying something like "(copied from <a href="original page source">here</a>)". Both to gently hint that giving credit is polite to people who tend to forget that, and to make life (even) easier for those who were planning to anyway.

(Of course for your example case of xkcd people are hardly going to fail to recognise where it's from, but...)

[andrewducker]

I get annoyed by things that add additional text. But wrapping the image in an href might be better.

[tysolna]

... while recuperating from a cold. My hat's off to you, Sir.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

That's pretty awesome. Does it copy the height and width, too? It's only polite, after all...

[matgb]

It does if it's defined in the image it's copying, but not if not, from what I can see.

[andrewducker]

It just copies the original HTML. Inserting my own HTML into the middle of it is a project for another day (if I can even use JS to discover the height/width).

[andrewducker]

It does now!

And also converts a relative URL into an absolute one.

Do me a favour and give it a test run?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-source-copier/

Should show version 0.3 (which is the version I just uploaded).

I ought to work out how to do options, so I can turn on and off the different bits of functionality for different users...

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Looks good. Outputs an upper-case 'A' in the tag, but I suspect only I would be irritated by such a thing.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Also irritating: height before width. Wrong way round. Was confused for a moment.

[andrewducker]

I've just checked, and it doesn't matter which way round I set it, attributes seem to come out in alphabetical order. Odd.

I've changed the A into a lower case one though, just for you. (I shan't bother doing another release for that, it'll get picked up next time I do one though).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Useful if you're going to hotlink, but unfortunately not the greatest choice for me. Still, neat!

[andrewducker]

If I'm going to rehost I use the Photobucket uploader, which isn't going to do this kind of thing, sadly.

Some way of combining the two would be lovely, I agree.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I'd much rather people used hyperlinks :(

[andrewducker]

You'd rather people never had images on their livejournals?

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

I think it would be better to link back to the original source with webcomics and the like. Photographs etc are different.

[andrewducker]

I do prefer people to at least include a link back to the original, but I also know that more people will see an image on my journal than will click through to something just because I say it's funny.

So I try to do something like this and post it, with the image being a link to the source.