Feelings Towards an Alternate Image-Hosting Site?

[rogue27]

Recently, a CC member named Shadow created a new LEGO Castle forum, which was not appreciated at all. I can understand that. The only thing it could possibly do is fragment the LEGO Castle community which would be a bad thing. The thread for reference:
viewtopic.php?t=5924

Oh, and I must say, I think Shadow is a better rhymer than Nathan.


Anyway, the above incident made me curious. What kind of response would there be if somebody created an alternate LEGO Image Hosting Site? (Alternate, as in NOT BrickShelf) Said site would probably function very differently from BrickShelf, but still serve the same ultimate purpose. Would it be appreciated or shunned?

This is all purely hypothetical, of course.


(Please move this to publishing if it belongs there instead)

[Recluce]

Isn't this kind of what happened with Maj.com? BS told us to move our files over, and I did, in addition to being able to host pics other thatn LEGO, and I know others did too. There is now quite a bit of LEGO over at Maj.

[HenrytheV]

BS told us to move our files over, and I did, in addition to being able to host pics other thatn LEGO, and I know others did too. There is now quite a bit of LEGO over at Maj.

BS? Ohhhhh, Brickshelf. Ya, maj.com just seems weird, what with people posting pictures of their cats and new cars. I just stick with Brickshelf, aka "BS".

[bombcar]

You'd have to list the argument for another site. Basically, what Lego image hosting does Brickshelf no allow that the new site would? What would be the reason to use it?

Because it is a free service that works quickly and well, it would be hard to determine reasons why a new one would be needed. There was need for new forums (classic-space, classic-castle, etc) because Lugnet was no longer adequate and was also a newsgroup style message board.

[BreadMan]

Something that's kind of nice about brickshelf is that pretty much everybody in the lego community uses it, so you can just browse and get an idea of what all the latest happenings are in the community. Starting a new site would fragment that, the same as starting a new castle site would fragment the castle community.
But on the other hand we already have that with maj, and lots of people prefer to post stuff to their own sites anyway. Also, while brickshelf is great, there's other image uploading packages that have a lot more functionality out there (although I just learned about the auto-unpacking of zips, and batch uploading was up until now my biggest complaint).

[rogue27]

Well, a few reasons a new site might be beneficial to the community:

Many people have complained about BrickShelf for a variety of reasons. (Reasons I cannot remember) Maybe a new site would make some of those people happy.

A new site could possibly offer a variety of display options. Maybe the ability to put captions by each picture, have some control over how your gallery is displayed such as background color, font, thumbnail size, thumbnail shape, number of rows and columns, etc.

Imagine the ability to create a LEGO story all in one place. Most LEGO stories use BrickShelf for hosting and then have custom-created sites for displaying the pictures and text together in a story-like format. What if there was a site where you could do all of this in one place, and it was all easy to do?

A new site could have a different gallery organizational system/hierarchy that some people might prefer.

A new site might automatically shrink some of the ridiculous collections of unedited 2400x1800 images to a reasonable size so they can be viewed comfortably by people with normal computer screens.


I think a new image hosting site would be a bad idea if everybody was still using BrickShelf. It was nice to be able to browse BrickShelf and see everybody's collective LEGO works in one place. However, as others have stated, not everybody is using BrickShelf any more. There is the whole BrickShelf/Maj thing. BrickShelf lacks some features that can be found on more generalized image hosting sites.

Fragmentation of image hosting is not nearly as bad as fragmentation of the community, IMO. Castle fans come here and post their creations. Other Castle fans come here to view and discuss those creations. The Space fans have something similar. Nobody really cares which sites the image links go to. The community sites are what holds the group together. The image hosting is simply a tool to be used by the communities.


Personally, I like BrickShelf a lot. However, there are some things I want to do that BrickShelf does not do. I suspect that there are other people who feel the same way. If a LEGO-centric image hosting site was available that did some of the things that I wanted to do, I would use it.

[Bloody Jay]

I've always wished you could have your gallery auto-generate VB code (like on Photobucket) for the image and for a thumbnail link to your image. That would be way cool.

[Rubberchickenknight]

There's always MOCpages:
http://www.mocpages.com/index.php

[SavaTheAggie]

All I've ever wanted from Brickshelf was the ability to move/reorganize folders. You know, move a folder to within/without another folder.

--Anthony

[Bruce N H]

For one, alternatives already exist--Maj.com, 1000Steine.Com MyImages galleries, Flickr and other non-LEGO image sharing sites, the official LEGO.com stie, people's individual sites, FBTB Customs galleries, other community sites that host their own images (e.g. the Czech site Kotsky.org seems to host members' images), etc.

That said, I'm happy that most people still put images on Brickshelf, as I can easily get a feel for what's happening in the community at large without checking a whole bunch of forums, simply by scanning through the "recent" page. I've found a lot of different builders there who never previously posted in a forum I read (for instance, we all knew about marakoeschtra from his Brickshelf gallery long before he joined CC). If an alternate site further fragmented this it wouldn't be a great thing.

However, it's also quite scary how much the community as a whole depends on one site run by one individual. If Brickshelf is down for a couple of days the whole AFOL community goes nuts. If Kevin decides to close up shop one day, he could take down his site and none of us could stop it. As such, the existence of an alternate, LEGO-devoted site would be a good thing.

On Maj, the pain in the neck is that you have to weed through all this stuff to find the LEGO. There's not even a pre-set category for LEGO (just "toys"), so unless someone remembers to add "lego" as a keyword, you can't easily pick them out.

Bruce

[lil Jon]

I don't think I'd go to other sides. I mean as of now, I only come to this site, and brickshelf. Sometimes I look at the highlights on Lugnet, but its gone mad over there. I never look at maj or MOCpage.

I'm a big fan of one stop browsing, there is no need to divded it up.

As for the time brickshelf closes shop, that'd be pretty bad. But I'd get over it, I mean my entire life isn't based on posting pictures of MOCs (yet).

[Recluce]

On Maj, the pain in the neck is that you have to weed through all this stuff to find the LEGO. There's not even a pre-set category for LEGO (just "toys"), so unless someone remembers to add "lego" as a keyword, you can't easily pick them out.

I add LEGO and other identifying keywords to mine all the time.... like I did to the stuff I just uploaded! Some of us actually use the features provided to us.

[Bruce N H]

On Maj, the pain in the neck is that you have to weed through all this stuff to find the LEGO. There's not even a pre-set category for LEGO (just "toys"), so unless someone remembers to add "lego" as a keyword, you can't easily pick them out.

I add LEGO and other identifying keywords to mine all the time.... like I did to the stuff I just uploaded! Some of us actually use the features provided to us.

Hey Recluce,

My problem isn't that the functionality isn't there, just that it's not automatic, so many people don't use it. That makes it difficult for the rest of us who would like to quickly see what's new in LEGO without having to dredge through other things.

Bruce

[Drucifer]

If you're interested in doing this (or for personal websites), there's a great open source online photo management utility, called Gallery, available.

[rogue27]

If you're interested in doing this (or for personal websites), there's a great open source online photo management utility, called Gallery, available.

Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at it sometime, but I doubt that I would use it.


I guess this is where this thread stops being purely hypothetical.

I had been hired earlier this year to produce image galleries for several different websites. I prefer to write my own code, so I did. I have been polishing it up a bit and adding features more recently. I was actually planning to name it "Gallery", but I guess the obvious name has already been taken.

Anyway, it's not too big a leap for the code I've written to be turned into a multi-user image-hosting site with some LEGO-centric features. I will most certainly put something like this on the internet at some point in time. Probably Winter when my real job slows down.

What would be a big leap is actually shelling out cash for the amount of bandwidth I would need if the site became popular and coming up with a business model that would allow me to do this without losing money. As such, I may not make the site available to the general public. It is quite possible that the site would be primarily for my own personal use.

I am a very good programmer, and I have no doubt that I can create a site that is technically superior to BrickShelf as it currently stands. However, that does not mean it would be better. The best code and features on the internet means little without users and visitors, and a site that loses money won't stick around long. I also would not want to create a site that would be received negatively by the community at large.

Anyway, I appreciate all of the input. I now have an idea of what people are thinking. Feel free to continue responding. I'll continue reading this thread.

Thanks.