By-passing the spaceball.gif

Downloading a photograph from a website such as Flickr is generally as simple as right-clicking on the image and choosing "save image as" (Firefox) or "save picture as" (Internet Explorer). BUT... when you attempt that on some Flickr pics, you find yourself saving not the image you expected, but something called "spaceball.gif". What's going on?
First, .gif is a graphics format in the same way that .jpg and .tif are graphics formats. One of its advantages is that a colour in the image can be made transparent, and many web designers use a transparent gif to create an invisible space in a web page. So some contributors to Flickr place a transparent gif over their pics, and when you try to right-click on the pic, you are picking up the gif and not the photo underneath.
The good news: there are several ways to bypass the gif and download the photo. Here is the simplest. There is a very fine margin (1-2 pixels) at the bottom of the photo which the gif does not cover. If you put the point of your cursor at the very edge of the photo and right click, you should be able to pick up the photo (it might take a couple of attempts to get right).