LotroShots

LotroShots.net grew out of two things that have been with me for a very long time: an affection for Tolkien's world, and a tendency to save far too many screenshots from the games I spend time in.

Middle-earth long before the game

My interest in Tolkien goes back much further than LOTRO. Middle-earth, its history, places and characters had been part of my reading and imagination for many years before I ever stepped into the game.

I had, however, managed to stay away from MMORPGs for quite a while. That changed in 2013 when my daughter persuaded me to try The Lord of the Rings Online.

"Try" turned out to be a rather optimistic description.

I kept playing. Over the years there have been periods of more and less activity, different characters, different servers and plenty of wandering off to do something else, but LOTRO has remained one of the games I regularly return to. I still play it today.

And then came the screenshots

LOTRO is a game that constantly invites screenshots. Sometimes it is a landscape, sometimes a familiar place from the books, sometimes a character moment, an event, a ridiculous outfit or simply the light falling across Middle-earth in exactly the right way.

Over time those images accumulated, and LotroShots became a place to keep them organised and accessible rather than leaving them scattered across computers, folders and old drives.

From HomeworldShots to LotroShots

By the time LotroShots came along I already had HomeworldShots running, so the technical side was fairly straightforward. I already knew how I wanted an image archive to behave, how to organise albums and how to keep large collections reasonably manageable.

In that sense, LotroShots was the easy project: take a concept that already worked and adapt it to a completely different game.

The harder part was deciding what the site should actually be. LOTRO is not just a game full of screenshots; it is a representation of a world I had known from Tolkien's writing long before I ever logged in. That makes the images feel different. A screenshot of Bree, Rivendell, Moria or the Shire is not just a record of gameplay — it is also somebody's visual interpretation of a place that existed in my imagination years before the game did.

A personal archive that became shareable

LotroShots began as a practical way of keeping my own screenshots organised, but it made little sense to build a gallery system and then keep it entirely private.

The site therefore grew into a place where images could be grouped by character, location, event or simply by whatever happened to be worth remembering at the time.

Member albums also made it possible for other players to keep and share their own screenshots. I have never tried to turn LotroShots into a large social network or community portal; it is much simpler than that. It is an image archive first, with enough community functionality to make sharing useful.

More diary than database

Looking back through old LOTRO screenshots is surprisingly close to looking through photographs.

You remember characters you played with, people you met, kinships, events, festivals, server changes and places you spent far too much time in. Some images record something important. Others record absolutely nothing of importance — which can make them just as interesting years later.

That is probably the real reason LotroShots has survived. It is not an attempt to catalogue everything in The Lord of the Rings Online. It is a visual record of time spent there.

Still playing, still taking screenshots

LOTRO has changed a great deal since 2013, and so has the way I play it, but it has remained a remarkably persistent part of my gaming life.

Characters have moved, servers have changed, old areas have been revisited and new ones added, but I still regularly find myself stopping somewhere in Middle-earth because the view deserves another screenshot.

Which means LotroShots is unlikely to run out of material any time soon.

LotroShots today

LotroShots is not intended to document every corner of LOTRO or compete with databases, wikis or fan sites. There are much better places for that.

Its purpose is simpler: preserve the images, the memories attached to them, and a little bit of my own journey through Middle-earth.

Visit LotroShots.net