Most of us prefer not to see images while browsing. There are a lot of reasons for this. I prefer this because it increases page loading speed and hence the overall browsing experince. It is also preferred by those who prefer only content part of a particular page and not the images part of it, though they say ‘An image speaks a thousand words‘, it is not true always 🙂
I am an avid Firefox user and there are lot of ways we can achieve this if we use firefox. But I’ve been using Chrome for a while as we all know it is famous for its loading speed and my first choice when I want to read something quick !
Initially I could not find a direct way to switch off / disable image display in Google’s Chrome but there is an easy way to turn it off. Follow the steps layed out below, without missing a single step and you should be able to turn off the images in your Chrome Browser (There are two ways tos do it and both work fine on all versions of Windows – I’ve checked in on XP and Vista):
First method:
1> Make sure there is no Chrome Browser launched. If you are reading this in Chrome, then open this URL in Internet Explorer or Firefox and close the instance of Chrome.
2> click on Start –> Run –> and type ‘chrome -disable-images‘ without single quotes and hit Enter.
3> A new instance of Chrome should launch now and if you surf in this instance or any other instance launched while this one is still open, then images will not be displayed in the browser.
4> If you want to browse with the images option, then you’ll have to close all instances of Chrome that is running and start Chrome the usual way you are used to.
Second method:
1> Create a shortcut icon of google chrome on your desktop, and rename it something like “Google chrome – disabled images” or whatever you prefer. This is only for you to easily recognize between the normal Chrome and the one with Disabled images feature activated.
2> Right click on the above mentioned shortcut icon and select properties.
3> Here, you’ll notice the target textbox which will have the location of where Google Chrome is installed in your system. Append “ -disable-images“, of course without the double quotes. There should be one empty space between the chrome path and -disable-images.
Now here’s a bit of clarification : If you are using Windows Vista, then the path to Chrome.exe is not included in Double quotes, but if you are older version of windows, then it will be included in double quotes. So you’ll have to add -disable-images outside the double quotes.
4> Close all versions of Chrome, if any are open. Open chrome from the newly created shortcut and no images will be displayed in this instance of chrome !
If you have any problems please post in the comments section here and I’ll try to help you out of your problems.
Just create a shortcut pasting “chrome://chrome/settings/content” on the address bar and put it on the bookmarks bar,then in two clicks you can toggle image on/off.Why doing all tough stuffs?!!!
Hope it helps
@Euphoria – Haven’t tried this one, but sounds like a cool option worth trying.
Here is how you do it without adding any command lines, or having to restart Chrome just to disable images.
Go to Options,
then click on the “Under the Hood” tab,
Then, select “Content Settings…” towards the top, right below where it says “Privacy”,
Then click on Images, and select the “Do not show any images” button,
Optionally add any exceptions, and then close. And there you have it, no images displayed in Chrome. No restarting, no adding a command to a shortcut.
Yup.. worked for me 🙂 i use linux, i had to do the following.. for linux users, open a terminal or press “alt+F2” type “google-chrome -disable-images &”