Brickshelf is shutting down

This was bound to happen eventually… One of my all time favorite websites, Brickshelf, is shutting down around March 1st.

You probably know what Brickshelf is. If not: it’s a Lego image hosting website that was very popular during the 2000s and early 2010s, slowly losing activity over time when bigger sites like Flickr gained popularity.

Where other people can scroll Tiktok or Instagram for hours on end, I can spend way too much time just going on “random folders” and digging through whatever the site shows me. It’s a great peek into the Lego community of the 2000s, and there’s especially large amounts of Bionicle stuff!

I’m surprised the website has even stuck around until now. Over the past year, there’s only been like 5 active uploaders, and I doubt there were many people actively browsing the site besides me. New account creation has been disabled for a long time.
Brickshelf’s owner, Kevin Loch, has passed away in June last year, and now it’s time for the site to go offline. It’s only logical, the site really isn’t viable anymore.

I’ll probably end up saving some of my favorite Brickshelf pages for future reference, they often make great inspiration for me and are just fun to look through.

Now… Enjoy Brickshelf while it lasts!

12 Likes

Given the immense popularity of Brickshelf over the years, I feel that someone will get an archival of the site up and running in short order, or perhaps even purchase the domain before the expiry date (a purchase offer was presented in the email, after all).

10 Likes

Wall of History is in talks to buy it, and they already have a 99% complete backup if the worst comes to pass. However this turns out I shouldn’t think there’ll be much of an issue going forward

8 Likes

Is it actually 99%? I heard they had all public stuff but I couldn’t speak to what percentage is public and what is private

4 Likes

Should be, all this information was said directly by Wall of History’s developer

5 Likes

I know this is really unplausible, but it would be great if someone could somehow organize all that stuff as well and make it more searchable.

4 Likes