For years, many photo collectors have added photos from the internet
to their collections.  Often you see photos you just have to have.
Others show subjects you would never have the opportunity to shoot
yourself.

Many collectors have discovered that if you use the Opera web browser,
www.opera.com, rather than saving individually each photo you might
want to keep, a very time consuming process, you can regularly view
again photos you have seen by extracting photos from the browser
cache, a form of internet scavenging.

Opera made this easy to do.  User browser caches can contain thousands
of files.  When Opera stored a photo in browser cache, it stored the
file extension with it, such as filename.jpg.  Thus you could use
Windows Explorer or other file management programs to identify and
copy just .jpg, gif, or .png files from the cache to a work directory,
where you could also easily eliminate small icon files not worth
looking at.

To do this, you must be able to locate the cache directory and
understand how cache files come and go with time and how frequently
you must review them to not miss any.  This is an individual empirical
process.

Opera worked fine for years, until this summer when Opera released
version 9.5.  With that version, Opera removed all the file extensions
on files in the cache, and left users unable to separate easily photos
in the cache from other files.  It stored the files as extensionless
files.  Identifying worthwhile photos among the cache files turned
from a trivial task into a time consuming undertaking.  The attitude
at Opera towards people affected by this change, has been "screw
you."  They apparently have no intention of restoring the extensions.
They have not satisfactorily explained why they made the change.

Photo collectors should not take it personally.  Opera has screwed
lots of people trying to get its new release to work like earlier
ones.  Read the  stories at http://my.opera.com/community/forums/forum.dml?id=26

Cache extensions users should not despair.  You can get basically the
same functionality with Firefox with a user program Mozillacacheview,
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html

Firefox, like Opera now, has not included extensions on files in
cache.  The cache files names looked like random numbers.  With the
cache file extensions, Opera has had the advantage over Firefox.  For
photo collectors, Opera has thrown away that advantage.

With Mozillacacheview, users can view the Mozilla cache file with a
Windows explorer like display and see the actual file names and
extensions rather than the random number cache names.

You cannot open the files directly from the program, but you can
select files and copy them to a work directory, where they
miraculously get their original name and extension back.

You can also set the program to view only photos, audio, and video
files.  So limited, you can then sort the files by size, select only
the largest, and copy them all at one time to a work directory, where
you can browse them with an image viewer program and decide what to
keep.

You can do the same thing with other file types.  Some people may like
to look at videos again by identifying the video files in the cache
and playing them with a player program.

You can also identify html and javascript files.

Mozillacacheview is a good program.  Its developers merit credit for
improving the state of the world.

With this program and Firefox, photo collectors can get back to where
they were with Opera.

Opera is a proprietary product built by a small group of people.
Firefox is open source and comes from a cast of thousands of users and
is the product of a committee.  A small group can build a faster and
better program than can a committee.  On the other hand, a group of
users can have a better sense of what users need and build a better
program for those needs. In the Opera Firefox browser war, the latter
consideration is now producing the better browser.