LEGO Gallery

The LEGO.com Gallery was a free social media sharing site devoted to sharing and talking about LEGO creations. It has been taken down by LEGO in favor of a shallower social media app called LEGO Life, and links to the Gallery now redirect to the LEGO Life landing page.

Founding
The LEGO.com Gallery, or the General Gallery, was made to fill a hole in the range of LEGO.com Create & Share subsites. Before, there had not been a general-purpose Gallery; every gallery had a specific purpose or theme. The Gallery was first opened sometime in 2013, with the first creation posted on October 9, 2013.

Another purpose of the Gallery seems to have been to give a place for the users from the LUCL to gather after the Lab was shut down.

Differences from the LUCL
The Gallery had some improvements over the LUCL, one of the nicest of which was a raised character limit; the Gallery uploader allowed up to 3400 characters. It also supported larger image sizes (if not resolutions) and supported PNGs with transparent backgrounds.

The new site had a white and blue color scheme and looked similar to most of the other galleries around LEGO.com, the City Gallery for instance.

More importantly though, many users from the LUCL quickly became disenchanted with the site, believing that it just didn't feel the same.

Many users either said goodbye or slowly faded away as they aged out of LEGO. The Gallery was still a good place to find LUCL users though.

Maintenance
The LEGO.com Gallery has become an infamously poorly-maintained website. Numerous glitches have been known about for years, and while site-breaking glitches are sometimes patched, most glitches have been ignored. The site has not been updated since 2013 when work on the site seems to have stopped.

Eventually, moderation became so lax that a single spammer was able to ruin the site for weeks and caused several users to abandon the site out of frustration.

Closing
Sometime in late 2017 around Christmastime, a banner appeared over the Gallery that said it would be closing soon in favor of LEGO Life, confirming the theory. Sure enough, the Gallery disappeared without a trace about a month later. Many of the remaining users migrated to MOCpages, where a Gallery group was formed. MOCpages has since closed down as well, leaving Brick Lab as the preferred creation sharing platform.