Tutorial - Removing Image Toolbar Icons in IE6+


This short tutorial submitted by Henk Mengerink explains how to disable the little icons that appear when you hover your mouse over an image when viewed in Internet Explorer 6 and up. These icons let you save the image, print, or email the image without having to right-click on it. A user can turn this feature off in their IE browser settings, but sometimes a webpage designer may not want to have these icons show up in anyone's browser in certain circumstances.

If you haven't disabled this feature in your IE6 browser already, hover your mouse over the two images below and you'll see what I mean.


When you hover over this image, a set of gallery image icons will appear over it.   When you hover over this one, no icons will appear on the image.
 



This adjustment is simply an attribute you can put in the <IMG> tag that will disable those icons. See the code below:

<IMG SRC="arrows.jpg" WIDTH="300" HEIGHT="200" GALLERYIMG="NO">

This attribute only effects Internet Explorer 6+. Since other browsers don't understand the attribute, they simply ignore it.

If you want to know how to permanently disable all image icons, go to "Internet Options", select the "Advanced" option, then scroll down until you see the option to "Enable Image Toolbar". Again, this only effect Internet Explorer 6+ browsers.

Thanks Henk.


Updated!

You can add a line of code to your page that will disable the image icons on all images on your page even though the user's browser has not been set to do so. Just copy and paste the line of code below into the HEAD section of your page(s):

<META HTTP-EQUIV="imagetoolbar" CONTENT="no">

Again, this attribute only effects Internet Explorer 6+. Since other browsers don't understand the attribute, they simply ignore it.