images blocked in Windows Explorer Preview Pane when viewing saved webpages

windows-explorer images preview

10,933

This is to help protect you against potentially malicious functionality accessing your computer. When the html is located locally on your computer, it is possible for the server where the images is located to read certain details about your computer. This warning is a good thing - if you trust the original site where the pictures are located, you can choose to allow it (after the warning). You would think that static images can not do harm, but images can be created dynamically on the server, and in that case, the image url is a call to a server function that returns the image response after doing some stuff on the server. The server process can read some information from the parent web site (which in this case is your computer).

If you want to get rid of the warning, you must save the complete web page, not just the html. You have 2 options in the Save as... dialog in IE that does this:

Web page, complete (.htm;html)

This stores the html, and also all related resources (images, css files, js files etc) in a separate folder on your computer.

Web Archive, single file (*.mht)

This stores everything inside a single file, that can be read by IE. This stores all resources within the file as binary data.

10,933

Lcng

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Lcng almost 2 years

When I try to view saved web pages (with .html extension) in the Windows Explorer preview pane, I often see this message: "Some pictures have been blocked to help prevent the sender from identifying your computer. Open this item to view the pictures." Is there a way to prevent the blocking of the pictures?
Lcng about 13 years

Great answer, thanks. So is the warning triggered whenever IE detects code to retrieve an image from a remote server, as opposed to a local file? I still would like to find a way to disable the warning, or at least, the ability to load the page with images into the preview pane rather than into the default browser. I have many many saved webpages that were saved automatically by Firefox extensions (Scrapbook, Slogger) that unfortunately trigger the warning. Also I think the same problem applies to EML files.
Alan Baljeu over 8 years

I have an html file on my computer referencing a local image like this: <img src="images/SplashMain3.jpg" />. Windows Explorer is still blocking this image and giving me the error. So I think this answer is not the complete story.
Dr. Goulu over 4 years

Happens even when inlining the image as in <HTML><BODY><img src="data:image/png;base64,... Can't see how this can be dangerous ...
awe over 4 years

I would think the blockage is done in a general way, and not allowing the special cases that are not harmful. If alowing all kinds of exceptions, it is also potentially opeing backdoor possibilities that was not thought of when the exception was created.
www-0av-Com over 3 years

@Dr.Goulu I agree with all these comments. This is why MSIE lost out in the explorer wars. There idea of security is just to BLOCK everything which is such a lazy solution. I remember the 1st time I started using chrome because MSIE at the time blocked file drag and drop. I never looked back.