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*** September 2026 Image & Video Thread ***

pdk42 said:
Another image from Yorkshire. S1Rii with 20-200.


More of God's Country by Paul Kaye, on Flickr
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Love this one! I’ve been feeling inadequate to post anything I’ve done this month. ^^;;

I wish I knew why some Flickr embeds are showing up as broken images over the last couple of weeks; I have to click through to see them. ;_;
 
Travis Butler said:
I wish I knew why some Flickr embeds are showing up as broken images over the last couple of weeks; I have to click through to see them. ;_;
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I don't know why I don't ditch Flickr. It's just steadily getting worse and more expensive.
 
Travis Butler said:
I wish I knew why some Flickr embeds are showing up as broken images over the last couple of weeks; I have to click through to see them. ;_;
Click to expand...
Flickr BBCODE sequences include a link to the JPG hosted on Flickr's "static" content server. For example, this BBCODE extract:

1789682776513.png


Contains the URL below which is the JPG on "staticflickr.com":

1789682837410.png


Pasting this URL in to my browser directly, I sometimes get HTTP 429 errors.

Google AI has this to say about it:

An HTTP 429 "Too Many Requests" error means Flickr’s edge firewall (AWS CloudFront) has flagged your network IP or the forum's hotlinking requests as a scraping/bot threat and temporarily banned it.
When a forum thread loads, the software attempts to download all the BBCODE live.staticflickr.com image assets simultaneously. If a thread has dozens of high-res image links, Flickr interprets this sudden burst of image requests from your IP address as a malicious hotlinking or Denial of Service (DoS) attack, triggering a hard block.

## Why pasting it directly still fails
Once your network IP is flagged by the 429 filter, all direct traffic to staticflickr.com is locked out for a cooldown period (usually 15 minutes to an hour). Even pasting a single URL will continue to serve a 429 until the block expires.


## How to bypass the 429 block right now
* Switch Your Network (Clear the IP block): The fastest workaround is to force a new IP address. Disconnect your device from your Wi-Fi and use cellular data, or activate a VPN service. If you paste the URL using a fresh IP, it should load instantly. [4]
* Change Your User-Agent: Flickr’s anti-bot protection aggressively targets certain browser configurations. Users on community forums have found that using a browser extension like User-Agent Switcher to spoof your browser as standard Google Chrome completely bypasses the static link block. [5]
* Strip Down the Target URL: Check the URL structure you are pasting. If the BBCODE generated links containing a _d suffix (e.g., _d.jpg or _d.png indicating a forced download path), strip the _d out. Flickr's 2026 firewalls heavily throttle download-appended URLs while letting standard static image paths pass. [6]
* Purge Cache in Incognito: Open a private browsing window after changing your network IP. CloudFront occasionally attaches the 429 state to temporary session cookies. [4]
*

## The Long-Term Forum Fix
If you are the forum administrator, you need to change how the platform serves embedded media. Enabling a Proxy Images feature (built into forum software like XenForo or Discourse) routes all BBCODE images through the forum's server cache instead of forcing every individual user's browser to bombard Flickr's servers simultaneously.
 
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But this behaviour is new - I guess it's caused by some Flickr admin tweak to the rules around scraping/bot threats. Sigh ...

I've raised a ticket with them, let's see what they say!
 
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