if you hung out on lego fan forums circa 2001, you wanted to show people 640x480 digicam photos of your constructions. To do this, you needed a server that would host images, which didn't exist. Someone, presumably some form of Dad, decided to solve this problem altruistically and created Brickshelf
Brickshelf predated Photobucket and most other ""free"" image hosts by several years, and it was insanely reliable. Whoever runs it was clearly spending a ton of money to keep it up, just out of pure love for lego robots
The catch was (presumably still is): Everything you upload is manually moderated and they'll delete anything that isn't related to legos
