View Image for Google Images extension for Firefox and Chrome

View Image is a browser extension for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox that adds a "view image" button to Google Images so that users can click on it to display the image directly in the browser.

Google removed the view image button from its image search engine Google Images recently after the company came to an agreement with Getty Images.

The button loads the image that is displayed directly. This gives users options to look at it more closely and to download it to the local device that they use.

While it is still possible to to do after the removal of the button on Google Images -- users can still right-click on the image and select "open image in new tab" or a similar option -- view image made the whole process easier and many Internet users probably don't know that they can open the image through the context menu.

We suggest that you use a different image search engine such as Startpage instead. You can view images directly on Startpage and images do get opened through a proxy so that your IP address is not revealed to the site hosting the image.

View Image extension

View Image is a new browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that adds the button to Google Images again.

The extension should work in compatible browsers such as Opera or Vivaldi as well, and the functionality of it is identical.

The extension does require access to your browsing data on all Google sites and the code is available on GitHub.

Closing Words

Google users who used "view images" in the past regularly to load images in a standalone tab may use the View Image browser extension to restore the functionality. Most users don't need it probably though as it is still possible to right-click on images to load them individually.

Now You: Which site do you use for image searches?