Changing IE's default image viewer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eric
  • Start date Start date
E

Eric

Greetings:

Trying to change the behavior of InternetExplorer IE when you click on
a link that points directly to an image...

For example:

This link: http://whatever.com/image.jpg

When you click on this, IE's default behavior is to open up the image
in a browser window...

We instead would like it to open up the image in say, microsoft picture
editor for example or paint.exe, or paintshop, or whatever we specify.

Do you know of a registry setting or other way to change this behavior
?

best regards,

(e-mail address removed)
 
Hi, Eric; my father-in-law had this same problem. We went to the Help
utility in Windows (under Start) and typed in: associate. This brought up
instructions on how to associate a file with a particular program for opening
it. We chose the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, which worked better than IE
(affording some degree of picture management: rotating, zooming), but
later-on we changed this to a Ulead photo manager program that came with a
digital camera, for even more flexibility.
 
I could not find it, could you please provide the link to the answer ?

kindest regards,

Eric
 
Eric,

I don't know what that's all about, it wouldn't open for me either.
However, I believe that your fundamental question is answered completely in
the post that's 4 down from yours, "How to prevent IE from opening JPGs?",
the original question by coxrail and a total of 10 posts. There's even an
MVP involved... check it out.
 
IIRC that thread is discussing opening an image already saved to the HDD.
Eric's talking about an image on a webpage.
 
Not exactly, I am talking about a direct link to an image

i.e. http://whatever.com/image.jpg

as opposed to an img source tag on a page.

i.e. <img src=image.jpg>

This is a fine yet important distinction, since to open an image viewer
for each and every embedded image on a page would be tedious, and is in
fact not what we are after.

We only wish to open images with an image viewer of our choosing when a
browser goes to a direct link to an image, e.g.
http://whatever.com/image.jpg instead of rendering it with the browser
itself.

Another way to consider it is to consider the following:

Lets say you have a web page and on the page there is a link such as
this: http://whatever.com/image.jpg, when the user clicks on this
link, from within IE of course, instead of IE opening the image, an
image viewer of our choosing would.

Of course all embedded images, with img src tags would continue to be
rendered by IE.

Does this clarify it a bit ?

Thanks Again !!

best regards,

Eric
 
I think the only way to do what you want is going to be to add an entry in
IE's right lick context menu. Here is the registry key involved:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt

What you want is a right click context menu item that when over a link to an
image file, it will bring up an "Open with" dialog box where you can then
invoke the image viewer of your choice.

Problem is, for security reasons, this can only be to an HTML page - you
can't run an executable, say such as
"C:\Windows\rundll32.exe shell32.dll,OpenAs_RunDLL %1", to bring up the
"Open with" dialog box for instance.

So, someone better than me at this (and I've been playing around at this for
hours now) will have to write a script on an HTML page that will bring up
the "Open with" dialog box.

Maybe someone in a scripting newsgroup here can do this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroup...rosoft.public.scripting.jscript&lang=en&cr=US
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroup...osoft.public.scripting.vbscript&lang=en&cr=US

Examples of a programmer doing this:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1176116,00.asp
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/24/140283.aspx
http://www.jfitz.com/tips/search.htm - view source on this page to see the
script usage for this context menu
http://www.codestore.net/A55692/store.nsf/0/7FE96A40EC1955BD8625698A003ABBE5?OpenDocument

IE's context menu more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/overview/Overview.asp

Here's a program that will do something like this, but I think for only
Windows Explorer context menus:
http://www.baxbex.com/openexpert.html
 
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