Cross Domain Canvas Images

By  on  

You can do some really awesome stuff with images when you push their data into canvas.  And of course, when you're done playing around with the image, you can export the canvas data to an IMG element and data URI.  What we sometimes don't remember, however, is that the cross-origin rules apply to those images, so if you try to convert an image from another host to canvas, you'll get an error.  You can use this snippet from HTML5 Boilerplate within the image host domain's .htaccess file to allow cross-origin data reading of images:

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
	<IfModule mod_headers.c>
		<FilesMatch "\.(cur|gif|ico|jpe?g|png|svgz?|webp)$">
			SetEnvIf Origin ":" IS_CORS
			Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*" env=IS_CORS
		</FilesMatch>
	</IfModule>
</IfModule>

Allowing for CORS within .htaccess then allows you to pull image data when the image is on another domain. This is especially useful on CDNs! .htaccess is a life-saver sometimes!

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. I’m finding that I get CORS errors when I request from my own site and then convert them to base64 images using the “canvas technique” referred to here. Is that expected?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!