HUGE freaking thanks. I was losing my mind over this, and alas: A quick and easy fix for one of Reddit's worst UX decisions of all time.*

(Okay, so technically I've since switched from this extension to a browser userscript that does the same thing, but this one works identically for solving the problem. Oh and BTW if any of you prefer that option, there's an issue in this project's Github repo that contains a working one.)

The problem this extension fixes is so annoying. Even after you click the image and Reddit forwards you to preview.redd.it, it was still practically impossible to display the raw image in a browser tab without downloading it to disk first! (And doing so is practically required if you want to zoom in, since the Reddit photo viewer's built-in zoom functionality is next to useless.)

*(Second only to "Continue this thread" navigating to an entirely new page to show you the remaining 2 comments. Dumb dumb.)