I am working on a chrome extension which acts as the new tab page for a user. A number of users have asked for the ability to use their own, locally saved pictures as a background image. However, I have not been able to find a way to do this.
I am aware that there are many questions on StackOverflow with the same title as mine, but none address my specific needs:
- I need to download an image from a URL (i.e. a temporary Dropbox or Google Drive URL), or use an image from an HTML5 filepicker, as in this demo.
- The image then needs to be saved locally, preferably to the extension directory, and be accessed by the extension every time it loads
- I do not have access to PHP or to a server on which I could call a script or host images
The other answers suggest I use the Chrome FileSystem API. However, I understand that this API is only available to Chrome apps or on Chrome OS, not to extensions.
I also found an answer that mentions the file permission in the extension's manifest file.
"permissions": [
"file://*/*"
]
I would not be against using such a permission, even though "The user has to manually approve this permission by visiting chrome://extensions/ and put a tick at the "Allow access to file URLs" checkbox," as stated on this StackOverflow answer.
However, I would not know where to start with implementing this. Your help is very much appreciated!
** I am using jQuery in my extension, so that is an option, although I would prefer to use pure JS. *** The extension is CleanStart for Chrome, in case that is important.
Just an idea:
Maybe I could use chrome.storage to save a hex string representing the image, and then retrieve that string and convert it back to an image, as in this StackOverflow answer.
