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Comment by cgriswald | Hacker News Reader

If you try to use your browser's standard right-click Pinterest intercepts and gives you the option to Save (to Pinterest), open link (the very one you are viewing) in a new tab, see more ideas about education (on Pinterest!), see more from renee ma (on Pinterest!), or login or sign up for Pinterest.

If you click on the image, which is a link, it gives you a sign-in form.

Sure, the three dots are there to click; but "Download Image" is the only function listed. Why wouldn't it just be a download button...

Edit: And it's truly a 'download' versus viewing it directly in the browser...

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Any time a page does something stupid when you right–click, try it again while holding down shift.

Thanks for bringing that up. They've also hi-jacked that by making sure you can't hover over the actual img.

In Firefox, open the Page Info window (it’s in the tools menu these days). The image will be in the media tab.

Alternatively, (shift) right click and choose “Inspect Element” to open the browser dev tools. The element covering up the image will be selected. Delete it. With it gone, you should be able to interact with the image itself; right click on it and view it or save it.

Page Info > Media does work. Inspect Element doesn't work great. It highlights the body tag. You have to go through a series of about a dozen nested div tags to get to the relevant image tag, at which point you can open the image link in a new tab or copy and paste it.

However, the point is that you shouldn't have to do any of this. Pinterest took a normal browser behavior, co-opted it, and moved it behind a menu even though it's the only function available in that menu.

I completely agree with you. However, getting companies like Pinterest to stop requires teaching ordinary users how to bypass their idiocy so that users will see it for what it is and thus begin to vote with their feet or wallets.

Does this shift holding send electric shocks to the fingers of the person linking to pinterest?

Alas, no.

> Why wouldn't it just be a download button...

My guess is more options become available if you're logged in.

That's the worst part. If you're logged in, it'll flat refuse to show you the picture you logged in to see, and will instead dump you into a timeline of completely irrelevant images calibrated to improve your engagement.

I see your points.

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