Link to download image instead of view image

Question

I need to provide website visitors a link to download an original high resolution image. If I simply link to the image with a href="image.jpg", the browser displays the image. How do I make the browser download it?

I'm using amazon S3 to server these images... If this requires having a special header set on the image, I'm sure it's possible.. but I also want to display these images sometimes. Any tips on making this work with S3 would be great.

Answer 1

You can use the content-disposition header to let the client download the image:

Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=<file name.ext>

Answer 2

You are right. There are some headers needed to do this. These would be:

Content-type: image/png
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="some_image.png"

I am not sure how S3 handles this but if you want do display these images, the Content-Disposition header should be left out.

EDIT: Displaying the image via <img src="some_image.png" alt="" /> continues to work even with both headers being sent. The image displays nicely in my tests.