Question

When I click on an image link right now, Chrome downloads the image instead of opening it.

Even if I right-click and select Open link in new tab Chrome still downloads the image, and I have to go through the extra steps of opening the file for viewing manually.

This feels like a mime-type issue to me, but why would Chrome not recognize "image/png" as a valid mime-type for viewing? All PNG images display just fine in an HTML page.

NOTE: This only happens for PNG images.

Answer 1

The web server is probably serving the image using the image/x-png MIME type. Chrome does not recognise this as an image (as of August 2012 February 2013), hence offers the file as a download.

image/x-png is a legacy MIME type from the days before it got its official name, image/png, in 1996. However, when Internet Explorer uploads an image it does so using image/x-png “for backward compatibility“. I believe this was the case up to IE8, and was “fixed” in IE9. If the web server does not correctly handle this (the web server should detect this non-standard MIME type and treat it as image/png), then it may serve up the client-provided MIME type to other users, including to Google Chrome. Additionally, some web sites will serve up all PNGs as image/x-png.

If you’re the web developer you should detect incoming image/x-png and treat it as image-png (never serve up image/x-png).

If you’re the user report it as a bug and see @kriegaex’s answer for a workaround.