FORCING BROWSERS TO DOWNLOAD IMAGES (OR OTHER FILES) - Nov 27th, 2011

There are times that you'd like a visitor to be able to download images (and other files, like PDFs) instead of just displaying them in line. Here's a suggestion that originally came from Dave Edis at Interactive Tools. He suggested using an .htaccess file to do the job. Here's my version which presents a download dialog box when clicked on for all jpg,psd and tif or tiff files. This only affects files when you're linking to them, as in the code: <?php foreach ($your_tableRecord['your_upload_field'] as $upload): ?> <a href="<?php echo $upload['urlPath'] ?>"><img src="<?php echo $upload['thumbUrlPath'] ?>" width="<?php echo $upload['thumbWidth'] ?>" height="<?php echo $upload['thumbHeight'] ?>" alt="" /></a><br /> <?PHP endforeach; ?> Here's the .htaccess code <FilesMatch "\.(jpg|psd|tif|tiff)$"> ForceType application/octet-stream </FilesMatch> According to Shi Chuan on his blog at http://www.blog.highub.com/apache/http-server/force-files-like-pdf-download-using-htaccess/ "If you view the files in a web page, they will display, but if linked directly to them they will show you the save box. (Files don’t seem to download if they are saved in cache Ctrl+F5 to fix that)."

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