It looks at the request headers. When you navigate to https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg, Chrome sends (I'm doing this o

It looks at the request headers. When you navigate to https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg, Chrome sends (I'm doing this on Chrome because I think I've made some hacks in Firefox to fix this) GET https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9 and Reddit responds with a redirect to https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https://i.redd.it/dl34o62az.... But when the browser loads the same image from an <img src="..."> tag, Chrome sends GET https://i.redd.it/dl34o62azctc1.jpeg Accept: image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,image/svg+xml,image/*,*/*;q=0.8 and Reddit responds with the actual image.