Last week Flickr, under its new ownership, migrated their backend from Yahoo’s datacenters onto Amazon’s AWS. While reading through some old blog posts, I noticed that in the older postings Flickr photos were no longer shown, and were replaced with a browser error message.

It turns out that the player that existed at some point for showing Flickr images as an iframe in posts is now no longer in use. It probably lived somewhere on Yahoo’s servers, and didn’t come along to AWS.

More recently embedded Flickr images are fine as they are based on the actual URI of a Flickr image, which hasn’t changed. It looks like postings from 2011-2014 are the ones hit.

A quick search in the database of this blog for posts that contain ‘iframe’ and ‘flickr’ shows that at most 19 postings (out of 1657) are affected. From the list I recognise some that have a different iframe (e.g. a video or audio fragment) and a separate Flickr reference. I’ll add it to the list of things to fix, and do it manually for the dozen or so where a correction is needed.