Why can't I open saved jpgs?
I like to use Firefox (65.0.1) to download images from websites as reference and inspiration for art or games. Recently I noticed that the JPGs would not open on my MacBook using MacOS 10.12. I can open them in an image editing program but before I could open them with Quick Look or Just Looking. I tried downloading the same images with Chrome and they saved OK and I could use Quick Look to view it. One of the sites I'm having this issue with is Kickstarter. I saved an image from a site with Firefox and with Chrome. I opened both files with Text Wrangler, the Firefox version of the JPG has this in the first line/header, RIFF?=?WEBPVP8X. (The same image saved from Chrome opened in Text Wrangler as a picture.)
Why is Firefox saving the JPGs this way from some websites?
All Replies (7)
What site is it that is the problem?
Kickstarter for one, I download full pages from there when I see something interesting.
But from about February 15th all the JPGs are un-openable directly.
I can use GraphicConverter to open and re-save them but I shouldn't need to.
Downloading pages are hit and miss that isn't something the browser can really change. They probably changed their site security to prevent directly opening them.
They weren't hit or miss before. I was able to look at the JPGs with Quick Look and JPGs from other sites have a thumbnail whereas the Kickstarter ones do not anymore.
It's odd that their extensions are .jpg instead of .webp. Here's a sample file name: b33d44be34cc20717d1394ec307ecdf5_original.jpg
I haven't been following all the threads on WebP images (in a search there are many). However, it appears that one workaround is to make a settings change so that Firefox stops telling web servers that it supports WebP images.
See: Images won't save correctly after update
To spell that out in more detail:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button promising to be careful or accepting the risk.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste webp and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the image.http.accept preference to display a dialog where you can edit image/webp, out of the value as follows:
Default value: image/webp,*/*
New value: */*
(4) Double-click the network.http.accept.default preference to display a dialog where you can edit image/webp, out of the value as follows:
Default value: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
New value: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
If Firefox already cached the WebP image, you may need to reload the web page bypassing the cache (Ctrl+Shift+r -- on Mac, Command+Shift+r) to get a JPEG or PNG image.
Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
Thank you jscher2000!
That worked, they download as regular JPGs and open with Quick Look or Just Looking.
This is something good to know.