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Brickshelf has Gone Away

If you are browsing through backposts of the blog, and wonder where a lot of the pictures have gone, we apologize. Many of us used links to a image service called Brickshelf, which it appears has been removed. Please do not flame the owners/operators of Brickshelf - I'm not sure why this happened with no warning, but Brickshelf has proved free, high-quality image hosting for AFoLs for many, many years, and they should be commended for what they've done. Personally I keep all my own photos on my computer, but very sadly many folks didn't, so many of those great MOCs may be lost forever, including the accounts of people who have passed away and their Brickshelf accounts remained behind as epitaths.

If Brickshelf comes back, I'll be very, very happy... and if it is gone for good, I'll be very sad for the loss of a cornerstone of the on-line LEGO community. But I'll still be thankful for what we had, for a little while.

On a more proactive note, I'd like to request two things. First, if anybody actually stored all the screenshots that were in my "code snippets" folder, I'd love to hear from you to try to get copies (sadly these screenshots were things I did not have completely backed up). Second, I'm curious where you host your own LEGO images. Brickshelf was unique, to my knowledge, in that you could store text, video, still images, and LDraw files (again, many of which may simply be lost forever). Better yet, it was moderated (a tough job!), so we could link kids to it fairly confidently. Does anyone know of a similar service that offers all of those things? Or if not, what do you suggest?

Update: it seems Brickshelf may be still up, but migrating to a secure site. At least some people have been able to access it via https://www.brickshelf.com/ (note the "s" in https there).

--
Brian Davis

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