Is it possible to open web image files without the context menu?

For Firefox, click the tool menu drop-down and select Save Page As. Set the preference to HTML Page Complete. This will allow you to select a destination on your hard drive, then save the page there. All the image, JavaScript, CSS and other ancillary files for the page will be saved in a sub-folder of the folder where the page is saved. Browse them with any image viewer and you can see all.

@ETpro will try immediately…

@ETpro Indeed efficient. but what if I came across thumbnails in a grid that need to be enlarged to full size individually? This option saves them as thumbnails.

@Anatelostaxus Indeed, it only saves what’s there. If you need to save everything linked form there, you’ll need to download a tool that essentially spiders a site and downloads the whole thing, or some specified portion of it. As a Web developer, I sometimes have to do exactly that to grab everything when a client wants to move their site to new hosting. I’ve used HTTrack Website Copier and it has worked well for me. But things will download in the directory tree structure that’s on the target site. I won’t swear the download is safe today, but back when I grabbed it, it was virus and spyware free.

This may not be exactly what you’re looking for, but if you download the “Pin It” browser add-on from Pinterest, then when you’re looking at a page with multiple images that you want to save, you can hit the “Pin It” button and then click on each image that you want to save. The images will be larger than thumbnail, but I don’t think the tool follows links.

In Firefox, you can drag images to the new tab button to the right of your tabs. Unless they’re links, then the target of the link will be opened in a new tab.

You can also use DownThemAll! to save all images on a specific page, if you need that (I’m not entirely sure what you need).