So I came across a weird discovery today via my newly updated version of Cooliris for Firefox. It turns out that Cooliris somehow skirts user’s photo permissions and allows ANYBODY to see an image uploaded to Flickr at full size. Normally, users who set their photo permissions as “© All rights reserved” do not allow people viewing the photo to see the image at different sizes. The “All Sizes” magnifying glass icon above the photo is simply not there.

However, if you have Cooliris installed, you can just open up the image in the Cooliris wall viewer and see the image as large as your monitor resolution goes (this might or might not give you the FULL size of the image, but it’s at least bigger than the preview page on Flickr). I wasn’t sure if at first if it was just simple Flash zooming in on a small image, but upon further inspection, it looks like Cooliris can read the full size of the image and retain image sharpness and quality as you go full-screen with the image.

If you’ve got Cooliris already installed, you can try out what I just explained above on this image, whose current permissions do not allow the viewer to view the photo at any different size — that is, unless you have Cooliris installed.

I wonder if this might cause problems for Cooliris as more and more Flickr users find out that their protected images are simply a screenshot away from being taken.