You’re exploring a Website and suddenly an image jumps out at you! It’s beautiful, it’s inspirational, reminds you of growing up, or it’s a perfect example for your family to check out. What you want to do is save the image so you can reference it later, but how?
Whether it’s a new HD wallpaper for your computer, a picture you found from your childhood, an interesting graph or chart from a research paper, or just a plain old pretty picture, there are many times we want to save graphics and other images from webpages. The challenge is that sometimes it’s not so easy: Website designers can add code that makes it more difficult to save images from their site.
This can be added for a number of reasons, one of which is the protection of intellectual property but if you’re not planning on publishing it in your new book or showing it on your TV show what’s the big deal? Turns out that the copyright law includes something called fair use, which allows you to save a personal copy for your own enjoyment, even if it’s a copyrighted image.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at the basic ways you can save an image of a webpage on a Mac system. If you’re on Windows, Chromebook, or Linux, you’ll find that the basic process is the same, though the key strokes might be slightly different. Let’s have a look.
FIRST TRY: DRAG AND DROP
This may sound obvious, but few people realize that you can almost always just click, then drag and drop an image directly from your Web browser onto your computer Desktop. For example, if I use a recent article I wrote about The NYTimes Tiles puzzle as the test page, I can actually click on the image, keep holding down the mouse, and drag that image right off the page:
Because it’s so easy, I recommend that you always try this step first. The only wrinkle is that you cannot give the image a handy mnemonic name as you, it’ll keep whatever name the Website gave it during the design process. Not a big problem since you can always Rename it once saved, but that is another step.
SECOND TRY: CONTROL-CLICK (RIGHT-CLICK) ON THE IMAGE
If that didn’t work or you want to rename the image as you, try using a right-click (us Mac users know that as a Control-click) on the image. A menu pops up with different entries depending on operating system and browser. In Microsoft Edge on the Mac, I see this:
Lots of options! It’s easy to get a bit confused by all the choices, actually, but you can just look for the entry with the “…” suffix if you want. With Edge it’s labeled “Save Image As…” but it might have slightly different wording on your computer.
Now you can see the default image name and specify a new name if you desire:
What if you want to save it in a different folder? That’s what the tiny “v” button offers, just to the right of the current save folder (in this instance “Downloads”). Click on the “v” on your Mac and a bigger, standard Save As window opens:
Here you can again rename the file if you want, but you can also pick through your own folders and find the one you desire. Ready? Click on “Save” to save the picture or image.
THIRD TRY: SIDESTEP BLOCKED IMAGE SAVE
The third possibility is that when you try to drag the image off the page or right-click / control-click nothing happens. If you encounter that, it’s because the Website developer has explicitly blocked saving. But there’s a simple way to circumvent that using screen capture.
Every operating system has its own way of both doing a full screen capture or a specified region capture, and on a Mac system the default is that Command-Shift-3 is a full screen capture and Command-Shift-4 is a specified region capture. Very helpful to remember!
With this particular image, when I click Command-Shift-4, a crosshairs appears:
Now simply click and drag (hold the mouse or trackpad button down while you do this) from one corner to the opposite corner. It’ll look like this:
Notice that the tiny numbers adjacent to the crosshairs now show the image dimensions: 482 x 295. Release the mouse / trackpad button and it’s saved, likely to your Desktop. Done.
Between these three approaches, there should be almost no images you encounter in your Web browser that you can’t save for later or share with friends, family, and colleagues. Good luck!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about MacOS since the first release and have hundreds of helpful tutorials here on the site. Please check out my Mac help library for lots more useful content while you’re here!