Why "save image as" gives you the wrong file
This is the whole reason the tool exists, and almost nobody knows it.
X stores every photo you upload at four sizes and serves whichever one fits the layout. The largest it ever displays is capped at 2048 pixels on the long edge, and on a phone you are usually looking at something far smaller. So when you right-click and save, you get the version that happened to be on screen: a downscaled copy of a photo whose original is sitting one query parameter away.
Paste the post link here and you get all four, with the untouched original first. On a photo uploaded at 4000 pixels wide, that is the difference between a file you can print and a file that falls apart the moment you crop it.
Which size to take
- Original is the file exactly as it was uploaded, at whatever resolution the photographer gave it. Take this one unless you have a reason not to
- Large caps the long edge at 2048 pixels. It is what X shows on a desktop when you click a photo
- Medium caps at 1200, which is plenty for a blog post or a slide
- Small caps at 680 and exists for feeds and previews
Sizes that would produce the same pixels as the original are not offered. A photo uploaded at 1500 pixels has an identical Original and Large, and showing both would be two buttons that download the same bytes.
Posts with several images
X allows up to four images per post, and they are often the ones you actually want together: a before and after, a set of screenshots, a carousel of charts.
Every image in the post appears here, each with its own sizes, plus a button that saves all of them at full resolution in one go. They are saved one at a time with a short pause between, because browsers throttle or silently block a burst of downloads triggered at the same instant.
Alt text, where the author wrote any, is shown next to the image. It is worth reading before you reuse a photo: it often says what the image is meant to convey, which the picture alone does not.
Nothing passes through us
We read the post to find the file addresses, then your browser fetches each image straight from X's image CDN. The files never touch our servers, are never stored, and are never associated with you.
That is also why this stays free with no cap worth worrying about. A downloader that proxies files pays for every megabyte and gets slower as it gets popular, which is why so many of them are covered in ads or stop you after three saves. Ours costs a fraction of a cent per post lookup no matter how many images it has or how large they are.
What you can do with the file
Saving a public photo for your own reference is ordinary. Republishing someone else's photograph as your own is not, and no download tool changes who owns it.
The image belongs to whoever made it. Keeping it for reference, for a piece you have permission to make, or because it is your own post, is fine. Reposting it without credit or permission is copyright infringement, and X acts on those reports quickly. If a post is from a protected account it is not public, and this will not read it.
