What is a "tainted" canvas?

Although you can use images without CORS approval in your canvas, doing so taints the canvas. Once a canvas has been tainted, you can no longer pull data back out of the canvas. For example, you can no longer use the canvas toBlob(), toDataURL(), or getImageData() methods; doing so will throw a security error.

This protects users from having private data exposed by using images to pull information from remote web sites without permission.

Example: Storing an image from a foreign origin

Provided that you have a server hosting images along with appropriate Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, you will be able to save those images to localStorage as if they were served from your domain.

var img = new Image,
    canvas = document.createElement("canvas"),
    ctx = canvas.getContext("2d"),
    src = "http://example.com/image"; // insert image url here

img.crossOrigin = "Anonymous";

img.onload = function() {
    canvas.width = img.width;
    canvas.height = img.height;
    ctx.drawImage( img, 0, 0 );
    localStorage.setItem( "savedImageData", canvas.toDataURL("image/png") );
}
img.src = src;
// make sure the load event fires for cached images too
if ( img.complete || img.complete === undefined ) {
    img.src = "data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==";
    img.src = src;
}

Browser compatibility