I had given up on protecting online images since even disabling the easiest ways to get at images still left people the option to use Inspect, then Sources, and poke around in the folders until they found the right file, hey, presto.

The only real way to get around that was to break the image up into tons of fragments so you’re just depending on people not being able to code and getting bored with the idea of putting the image back together.

This site, however, has a public domain image that has somehow truly blocked the Inspect hack: The image appears within Inspect (d7… folder, 3rd image) but any attempt to open or download that image just produces useless "download" files instead of the actual image. How’d they pull that off? and why isn’t it more common? How expensive/time consuming would it be to implement for online image databases?

>Solution :

The image appears within Inspect (d7… folder, 3rd image) but any attempt to open or download that image just produces useless "download" files instead of the actual image.

I managed to download it (using qutebrowser) by opening in new tab. The filename was qwe_download.

When i opened the image in my file manager (Thunar), it showed as WebP image.

I used feh (image viewer) and it was exactly the image.

Maybe use WebP compatible image viewer to open the file.