Add a “Show Image” Switch for the Safari Browser on Your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch

Last updated on October 1, 2016

When we are using the Mobile Safari Browser to surfing the Internet, sometimes the page loading speed will be largely slowed down because of the large size of the images on the web page. Surprisingly, as one of the world’s most popular browser, the Safari Browser on iOS (the mobile operating system running on iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch) does not provide a switch to turn on/off the image display. However, this does not mean you can not add such a switch by yourself.

Get Your Device Jailbroken

Jailbreaking is the process of removing the limitations imposed by Apple on devices running the iOS operating system, such as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV. You need to jailbreak your device before you continue to next step. Don’t worry, the jailbreaking process is totally FREE. To get your device jailbroken, please take a look at this page. If you already have your device jailbroken, you could skip this step.

Modify Safari.plist

After jailbreaking, the next thing you need to do is to edit a plist file located on your device. If you are a normal user, you may want to install iFile. If you are familiar with UNIX shell, log into your device with ssh might be the best way for you.

You need to edit a file named Safari.plist located in /System/Library/PreferenceBundles/MobileSafariSettings.bundle/ on your device. To edit this file with iFile, first enter System/Library/PreferenceBundles/MobileSafariSettings.bundle/.1

Then tap Safari.plist and select Text Viewer.2

Tap the Edit button on the top left corner.3

Insert the following text into this file before the last </array>:

<dict>
  <key>cell</key>
  <string>PSGroupCell</string>
</dict>
<dict>
  <key>defaults</key>
  <string>com.apple.mobilesafari</string>
  <key>key</key>
  <string>WebKitDisplayImagesKey</string>
  <key>cell</key>
  <string>PSSwitchCell</string>
  <key>label</key>
  <string>Show Images</string>
  <key>default</key>
  <integer>1</integer>
</dict>

It should look something like this:4

Save the file. Now open Settings->Safari, you should see a Show Images switch at the bottom. If the switch is not shown, please reboot your device and open Safari Settings again.5

I tested this on iOS 5.0.1, but it should also work on other versions of iOS.

This post was written based on this post (a Chinese post).

3 thoughts on “Add a “Show Image” Switch for the Safari Browser on Your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch

    1. Hong Xu

      Yeah.

      Can you double check whether you have typed those words correctly, especially “WebKitDisplayImagesKey”? It seems that webkit has never removed this option. Sorry I no longer own an iphone any more so I cannot test.

      Reply

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