Old Webshots Photos & Albums (1999–2012) — What Happened to Them

If you're looking for photos you uploaded to Webshots years ago — old albums from community.webshots.com, pictures shared between 1999 and 2012 — this page explains what happened to them and where you can still look.

What happened to old Webshots accounts and photos

1. 1995 — Webshots begins as a screensaver and desktop wallpaper photo collection.
2. 1999–2012 — The photo-sharing era. Millions of members uploaded hundreds of millions of photos and albums to community.webshots.com, signing in with a screen name (username), not an email address.
3. October 2012 — Webshots was relaunched as a different service and photo sharing ended.
4. December 2012 — Member photos and albums were removed from Webshots servers. Old accounts, usernames, and uploads from before this date were not carried into today's system.

Signing up today will not bring your old photos back

Today's Webshots is a desktop wallpaper and screensaver app with a curated photo collection. It has no connection to the old photo-sharing accounts. Creating a new account will not restore, recover, or reconnect you to old albums, your old username won't sign in, and searching in the app will not find your old pictures — the app's photo library is our curated collection, not member uploads.

Where to look: the Internet Archive

Before the old site closed, volunteers preserved a large portion of public Webshots albums at the Internet Archive. It isn't run by us, but it is the best place to find old Webshots photos today, and searching it is free.

1. Step 1 — Recall your old screen name. The old site signed you in with a username, so that's what the archive is organized by.
2. Step 2 — Try your archived member page: web.archive.org/web/2012/community.webshots.com/user/YOUR-USERNAME (replace YOUR-USERNAME with your old screen name).

Open the archived Webshots community site: here →

Only albums that were public were captured, and not every page survived. If your albums were private, or your username doesn't turn anything up, the photos are most likely gone — we know that's hard news for a lot of people.

Webshots today

Webshots lives on as a wallpaper and screensaver app for Windows and macOS — back to its 1995 roots, with 5,000+ hand-picked HD and 4K photos. here →