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TechNote | Saving Web images
by John de Szendeffy
Most images found on Web pages can be copied to your computer (see Dartmouth College's Fair Use Guidelines for Web teaching, for example, to help determine when it's legal to copy).†
How to do it
 [Mac] Click and hold the mouse button on the image for a moment until a pop-up menu appears (at right). Select the save or download image option.
[PC] Click the right mouse button on an image. From the pop-up menu, select the save or download image option.
- Save the image file where you want it on your local drive and give it a more descriptive name, one that will make sense to you later when incorporating the image into your Web page, but keep the same file extension (.gif, .jpg, or .png).
- An image thus saved is already in a compatible format to insert into your Web page, as long as you don't need to change it. Saving an image used as a background on a page requires an additional step: it must first be displayed by itself in a new browser window. To do so, determine its exact location:
The <BODY> tag contains a reference to the background image, e.g.,
<BODY background="images/back.gif">
The file above is expressed as a relative path; the image file, "back.gif," is in a subfolder called "images" relative to the location of the Web page being viewed.
- Paste this path (without quotes) onto the end of the current page's URL minus the file name (e.g., "page.html"). Hit the enter/return key. For example:
If the current page URL is http://celop.bu.edu/mll/students.html
then the background URL is http://celop.bu.edu/mll/images/back.gif
The background image should appear in the browser window by itself.
- Save this image as you saved other Web images above.
Some graphics, such as Flash movies or Java applets, can only be saved using the computer's screen capture utility, which copies anything appearing on your screen.
- [Mac] Trigger the built-in screen capture by pressing Apple-Shift-3 (Apple-Shift-4 gives you crosshairs to select only the desired area to capture). The picture is saved to the Finder desktop as a PDF (in OS X) or the root level of the hard drive as a PICT (in OS 8, 9).
- [PC] Press the Print Screen key. The picture is saved in memory to the clipboard and needs to be pasted into a graphics editor. On a PC, you don't have the built-in option of selecting only a portion of the screen; you get the whole thing and need to crop it in an image editor.
Free utilities you can install capture all or part of the screen using crosshairs to select what you want by drawing a marquee box around it. Either copy the selection into the computer's clipboard (short-term memory) then paste it into an image editor or save it directly as an image file. The image will have to be saved in a Web-compatible file format, GIF, JPEG, or PNG, in order to be used in a Web page. (For Windows, see Screen Print & Capture 32, a free utility by Provtech.)
Web References
Sources of legal text
Cornell Legal Information Institute. For Copyright law, search for U.S. Code > Title 17.
United States Code, U.S. House of Representatives.
Regulations of the Copyright Office, U.S. Library of Congress, Title 37 CFR, Parts 200–299.
College and other sites providing guidelines for educators and students
Copyright and Web Teaching, Dartmouth College.
Intellectual Property, University of Texas System
Explanation of TEACH Act.
American Library Association
“Copyright 101 for Educators,” by Wesley A. Fryer, June 1, 2003, Technology & Learning online.
To determine whether a work is copyright protected at all, see
“When Works Pass Into the Public Domain in the United States: Copyright Term for Archivists and Librarians,” Cornell Copyright Information Center.
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