De-bloat Google Images

The current version of the <a href="http://images.google.com/">Google Image Search</a> has several usability improvements above the old one. In my opinion it also has flaws: if you click on an image in the search result list it points to a site called "Google Image Result" which displays the actual image in the foreground and the website where this image was found in the background. The old version of Google Image Search (which is still available in the Austrian version <a href="http://images.google.at/">images.google.at</a>) has some similar behavior. The intention of this page is to select if you want to either view only the image or the whole website. For me, neither of these two versions work especially well. Both, the old and the new approach load a whole website where I'm only interested in a single picture. One more negative aspect of this behaviour is, that there are no direct links from the search result view to the actual image files. In nine out of ten cases this makes me feel kind of slow. I'm looking for a way to modify the search results page of google image view to make the links of the individual pictures point to the actual files instead of the intermediary preview page.
1 answer

Use Google Image Relinker Mod

Userscripts.org is a sharing platform for scripts which modify the look and/or feel of websites. Such scripts usually manipulate the DOM-tree and CSS attributes of HTML documents. One particularly useful script for me is Google Image Relinker Mod. It rewrites the links from the result view of Google Image Search to point directly to the image file instead of the intermediary landing page.

To get the script working, follow the following steps:

  1. Make sure your browser supports user scripts (i.e. you use either Firefox, Seamonkey or Opera)
  2. When using Firefox, install the Greasemonkey extension
  3. Install the Google Image Relinker Mod script via the install-button on its site
  4. Make sure that the script is enabled in Greasemonkey (click the monkey on the bottom of Firefox to fire up the relevant pane) and enjoy your de-bloated version of Google Images
  5. .

Note: The links of the images in the search result list still point to the intermediate result site but the links of the images which are displayed when you hoover over the results, link to the actual files.