Flickr?

The Lego Car Blog Elves search far and wide for the very best Lego vehicles that the internet has to offer. Eurobricks, MOCpages, Brickshelf and others all have little Elven footprints across them, but by far the most common source of blog-worthy finds is Flickr.

Previously owned by Yahoo, Flickr – whilst not a dedicated Lego-sharing website like those mentioned above – has proved the default destination for much of the online Lego community, with free image hosting, a mail/message feature, and vibrant community groups.

In 2018 the overlords at Yahoo decided to cash in their Flickr cheque, and sold the site to SmugMug (nope, us neither). SmugMug have wasted no time in redecorating their new house and promptly announced a raft of changes to the site, the chief amongst which is a new 1,000 photo limit for each user.

Uh-Oh Spagetti-O

This new limitation means that from this week many Lego builders will be unable to upload any more images without either opening another account or paying to upgrade to SmugMug’s subscription service. It also means that builders who have already exceeded the 1,000 photo limit will see their images automatically deleted, starting from the oldest.

Impact on blogging sites

The knock-on effect for sites such as TLCB is that images may be deleted that have been used in past posts, breaking the link to the builder. Our apologies, this means that it’s likely that some links in our past posts will no longer function, and will instead return an error message like this.

Sites that use Flickr to host their images will see any deleted content disappear from their own pages too. The Brothers Brick is one such site where this would have occurred, however they have announced that they will now store all images used in their posts locally, including all past posts – so that even if an image is deleted on Flickr if it’s been blogged at The Brother Brick it will be saved.

What about The Lego Car Blog?

We’re in the fortunate position that all of our images are, and have always been, hosted here – hooray! This means that not a single image will be deleted from TLCB’s archives and that all images blogged here, whether they were found on Flickr or not, are safe.

What next?

We’ll have to see what impact SmugMug’s changes to Flickr have on the Lego community there. Perhaps very little, perhaps a lot, but either way surely the time is right for someone to fix MOCpages…