Classic-Castle.com

Hey all,

Back in the day Brickshelf was the place to post all your LEGO images. We could all post images there for free, link to thumbnails, post images in forums, etc. It was great, but limited in functionality. Also, there was a point several years ago where Kevin (the site owner) threatened to shut it all down, causing a panic in the community (anyone remember the days of us frantically downloading and archiving full galleries to prevent their loss?).

BTW, at some point Kevin added Majhost, more for non-LEGO images. This was a handy place to post other photos, but this did get shut down after a few years.

Anyway, along comes MOCpages. It also allowed you to upload photos and link them from forums, but it added the ability to include long descriptions, comments, and even create discussion groups. It was great, but glitchy. Frequent outages and generally slow load times have led to its disuse over the years (hey, maybe this has changed, I haven't been back there in a long time).

Then, along comes Flickr - all the advantages of the others, but a much better comment system, great upload/download times, very few outages, and a free terabyte of storage space. It was awesome. In fact, for many years the most active place for LEGO discussion and a boon to the community.

But. Today (actually yesterday) Flickr started deleting photos. Non-pro accounts can only have 1000 photos. You have the choice of paying them or deleting photos. Personally I went with deleting, about 2000 worth, along with all that history (links, comments, images in this forum and elsewhere).

Now what? Will Flickr continue to be the main repository for LEGO photos and a major hub for the community? Will we all decide to pay for pro accounts? Or will we just be much more selective about which photos we post and delete old stuff? Or is there some other viable option for photo hosting? I've been largely out of the online community for a year now, so maybe there are new resources I don't know about. What are you using? What other options are out there?

Bruce

There is another option. I learned about it from the Kim on the AE team from LEGO. Some of our entries from the CCC were already using it. I haven't looked into it...yet.

https://bricksafe.com/

Awesome. Thanks for posting that Blue. I do like that it's moderated as family friendly. While I love the free-wheeling Flickr, I'm more likely to have my kids surfing this site. I'll set up an account and report back on ease-of-use, features, etc.

Bruce

I'll use both flickr and bricksafe. Mostly I like flickr as a fanbase, and bricksafe just to host extra photos, let's see how long before my photo count gets tight on flickr though, alrady I have only about 50 more photos I can upload!

josdu wrote:I'll use both flickr and bricksafe. Mostly I like flickr as a fanbase, and bricksafe just to host extra photos, let's see how long before my photo count gets tight on flickr though, alrady I have only about 50 more photos I can upload!

I already deleted over 780 pictures. I find the whole thing...annoying.

Is creating a second flickr account an option? Sure you wouldn't build up the same amount of followers, but does that really matter? I don't know, I won't ever come close to the amount of photos to fill up 1000, so this doesn't affect me, but to veteran builders who have slowly built up their photostream and followers, I can definitely see the problem.

There was also that French Flickr clone some of us tried back when Flickr got rid of Pro accounts for a while (around the same time as ApocaLEGO became a Thing, coincidentally I'm sure). Unfortunately I can't actually remember what it was called.

Bricksafe looks interesting, although it seems to lack the tagging and descriptive capabilities of Flickr. Once you're logged in, does it have any kind of "like" or "favorite" capability?