Brickshelf
From Brickwiki
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Image:Brickshelf OT.png Logo for Brickshelf Brickshelf | |
| Website URL | http://www.brickshelf.com |
| Services and activities | Online: Hosting of images Real Life: none |
| Year founded | 2000 |
| Membership type(s) | Free registration required to upload, anyone can view |
| Membership cost | Free, but donations accepted and give ad free access |
| Target audience | ALEs worldwide who need a place to host pictures |
| Discussion groups? | No |
Brickshelf is an image-hosting site founded by Kevin Loch. Until recently, Brickshelf also hosted LEGO instruction scans (with tacit permmission and funding from The LEGO Company). The scans have since been moved to Peeron. Registering is free and only requires an e-mail address. Registration enables you to upload pictures of your LEGO creations to a personal gallery. Although membership is free, donations are encouraged, and Google ads do not appear to members who are logged in. The main page on Brickshelf.com includes an area that displays a selection of recently created or modified folders. Clicking the More link opens a page that displays more recent folders.
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Uploading and Organizing LEGO Images on Brickshelf
If you're a registered user, you can upload your LEGO images to your Brickshelf gallery. You can upload your images one at a time, or in Zip files.
You can also organize your LEGO images into folders, which can themselves contain subfolders. Brickshelf offers predefined keywords, such as "Train" and "Castle," that you can select when you create a folder. These keywords enable other users to find your LEGO images more easily. (You can also type custom keywords into an "Additional Keywords" box.) Assigning your image files meaningful names also makes them searchable.
Linking to Brickshelf Images
All images are moderated by Brickshelf administrators before becoming visible to other users. This means that someone reviews each image to make sure it abides by the Brickshelf terms of service agreement. Moderation is sometimes very quick, but it can often take several hours. Fortunately, deeplinking makes images accessible immediately. Deeplinking is especially useful when posting links to your MOCs on LUGNET or other LEGO user forums. View counts appear at the bottom of each image page, as well as for each folder and gallery.
The Brickshelf server automatically creates thumbnail images of each picture members upload. Thumbnail images are stored in a special subfolder invisible from main gallery pages. However, you can still link directly to thumbnail images. To link to a thumbnail image, right-click the image and select Properties (on Windows), or CTRL+click the image and select Open Image in New Window (on Macintosh). Select the address you see and use it as your link. Thumbnail image addresses follow this format:
http://brickshelf.com/gallery/<UserName>/<FolderName>/thumb/<ImageName>_thumb.jpg
With this format in mind, you can link to a thumbnail image without finding out its path.
Maj.com
Brickshelf has a companion gallery, Maj.com, which uses the same database coding and user accounts, but is not restricted to LEGO content. Although some people have placed LEGO content on Maj.com, most LEGO users continue to use Brickshelf.
Brickshelf Discontinued
July 2007 saw some major churn regarding Brickshelf. There was a discontinuance, where the site was not available at all, followed by a restoration with a warning that it was going away by 31 July, and an urging to users to save images. This resulted in several image slurping programs being announced or dusted off, other sites making announcements about what might be done, and presumably a spike in the load. As the users tried to save things, what was savable and with what degree of automation changed. Finally, as of 20th July, 2007, the Brickshelf site stated that it will be kept alive with a combination of free and paid-for premium accounts.
