Tainted canvases may not be exported

Question

I want to save my canvas to a img. I have this function:

function save() {
    document.getElementById("canvasimg").style.border = "2px solid";
    var dataURL = canvas.toDataURL();
    document.getElementById("canvasimg").src = dataURL;
    document.getElementById("canvasimg").style.display = "inline";
}

It gives me error:

Uncaught SecurityError: Failed to execute 'toDataURL' on 'HTMLCanvasElement': Tainted canvases may not be exported.

What should I do?

Answer 1

For security reasons, your local drive is declared to be "other-domain" and will taint the canvas.

(That's because your most sensitive info is likely on your local drive!).

While testing try these workarounds:

• Put all page related files (.html, .jpg, .js, .css, etc) on your desktop (not in sub-folders).

• Post your images to a site that supports cross-domain sharing (like dropbox.com). Be sure you put your images in dropbox's public folder and also set the cross origin flag when downloading the image (var img=new Image(); img.crossOrigin="anonymous" ...)

• Install a webserver on your development computer (IIS and PHP web servers both have free editions that work nicely on a local computer).