Website started: 1997
Owner: Ariane
I have always run this site alone, for the simple reason that I am very picky about the quality of the caps I upload. Screencaps were the first thing I uploaded, wallpapers the second, icons/avatars came after I joined Livejournal in mid-2000s
I’d love to have other peoples icons/avatars or wallpapers, but people don’t seem to make them or are just interested in posting them on Livejournal. And I don’t like begging people letting me post their stuff.
I have gotten several suggestions to add fanfic, but I don’t write Star Trek fanfic myself so I have none to post. Nobody’s said where I’d get that much needed fanfic to post. Also, sometimes it annoys me how people seem to think that if you’re a real fan, you’d write fanfic and how every fansite should have fanfic. You can express you fannishness in other ways. Making wallpapers is being a fan too. So is icons. And if capping 200+ episodes isn’t being a fan, or maintaining a website for 20+ bloody years, then I don’t know what is.
While I do read Star Trek fanfic, I don’t read that widely (anymore) and I’m not active and in contact with writers enough to feel comfortable asking to be allowed to post their fic here. I also don’t feel like I like ever really found my place in the Star Trek fandom – I’m not into the starships/tech side of it or the shipping (Kirk/Spock, Riker/Troi, whatever) or the… anything really that I’ve found online. When I first got online, I was very much into Spock/Chapel but the past 6-7 years, I haven’t been even into that anymore.
I’m… not sure what I’m into really, other than I’d love to have more things about the TOS guest stars be it wallpapers or fanfic. Especially wallpapers. And original characters. Vulcans, Romulans. I don’t know. But whatever it is, I haven’t found it and haven’t really networked with other Star Trek fans because of it much. I’m not into the things they are. So that’s why this site doesn’t have things like fanfic. Only the things I myself create.
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I’m one of the TOS cappers for TrekCore. I capped a good number of both the DVDs and the Blurays for them. I gave them permission to download the caps they wanted off my site, and upload them to theirs, as long as they credit me.
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I have been a Star Trek fan since mid-80s when I was about 11-12 years old and TOS started airing in my country. Star Trek isn’t well known in my country, and there were almost never any pictures in magazines – and when there were, it was Kirk, Spock and McCoy and the same few pics at that. When TNG started airing, same problem. So I was always hungry for photos and especially for new ones. By the time I was in my late teens/early 20s, I was so desperate that I’d started taking photos with my camera (!!!) of Uhura, Scotty, guest-stars etc. by the method of pausing the VHS tape and taking a photo of the television screen. This was better than nothing. I was so desperate.
Then 1996, when I started thinking about buying a computer, I thought that there must be a way to use it to take photos of television programs. And lo and behold, one of the computer shops that I went to look at computers and ask about screencapping (only I didn’t call it that, then, I had to explain what I wanted to do – there wasn’t a word for it yet), knew what I was going on about and knew just about such a thing called Snappy, and even had it in – so I bought the computer and Snappy from them and I have never looked back! Then on the internet, it was so liberating to learn that I wasn’t the weirdo that I thought I was, and that others had had the same exact desire and problem!
That same year, a few months after getting the computer, I got online and Star Trek websites was the first thing I searched for. About six months after getting online, in spring 1997 I made my very first website – this one! It was hosted by various freehosts, Fortune City most notably, and I uploaded my Star Trek TOS Snappy VHS screencaps there. Of course, being free hosts and offering like only 25MB of space, the website quickly ran out space so the site spread quickly out over like a dozen accounts at various hosts.
The next mile marker was in 1998 summer when I bought my second computer, and Star Trek TOS DVDs had started to come out. At that point, DVD-ROMs didn’t come (here, at least) by default with every computer but I wanted those TOS DVDs and I could see DVDs were the way of the future, so I paid the very handsome extra required and was happy. TOS was being released two episodes at a time – I think every couple of months – each disc was ridiculously expensive in exactly the one specialty local shop they were available here – and for some reason or another they wouldn’t get all of them, so it was slow going buying them and I tried to get them second hand as much as I could from the local version of eBay and eBay itself. I’ve never had steady employment, so finances can be and are tight. It took years to get them all and by the time I had nearly all of them, they went and released all three seasons as boxed sets which were still ridiculously expensive like all DVDs here but still a cheaper than the two-per-discs DVDs. And then came the announcement of the TOS HD DVD. I bought the HD DVD and capped it. Then came the Bluray, luckily I could borrow those to cap. But someday I’d like to be able to buy all the TOS Blurays to own and keep. I was finally able to buy them in 2015.
So I kept buying them, capping them and not hurrying about it either because 1) I didn’t have the money, 2) I was ill more or less all the time during 2008-present and 3) I couldn’t imagine ever not having TOS caps to work on.
The next mile marker is the hosting fiasco of December 2008. I’d been hosted by Dreamhost for several years at that point, this site at the subdomain startrek.crystalfires.net and at startrek.landofdreams.net before that. Long story short, my account which hosted all my various sites had grown too big for shared hosting and I couldn’t afford a virtual private server. I can’t remember whether this site was offline, or if it was hosted for a while by a friend of mine _snitchbitch@livejournal until I could get it approved for hosting by http://fan-sites.org but in any case, the site was moved to a new host and domain trekcaps.net in September 2009 where we happy for many years until fan-sites.org shut down.
In January 2011, I started to feel like I wanted to finish capping TOS, and because the vast majority of people (of the ones who comment, anyway) prefer rars/zips over galleries, I decided to upload the remaining caps that way because that meant I could get them up faster that way. (Because of no need to weed out bad ones).
In April 2011, I uploaded last of the TOS caps and marked TOS screencaps as COMPLETE.
In May 2011 real life got shitty again and updates on all sites suffer. Capping TNG season 1 from DVD.
In August 2011 we get the fabulous news that TNG will be released on Bluray. I halted my TNG screencapping immediately. There’s no point in continuing capping from DVD now, only to have to recap from Bluray next year. Because I know I’ll be capping the TNG blurays as soon as humanly possible.
I’m not entirely sure what to do right now. While waiting for the TNG blurays. I had a vague plan that first TNG, then DS9, and then selected episodes from VOY and then ENT at some point. But surely DS9 will follow TOS and TNG to Bluray at some point? But will it happen in 2-3 years, or a decade from now? Is there a point in starting to cap DS9 from DVD now?
Ugh. Hard question. I still don’t know, six months later. Started bulk capping DS9 DVDs in May 2019.
The next mile marker and it’s a HUGE one – January 20, 2012. MEGAUPLOAD SHUTDOWN. All my TOS caps gone. Collateral damage: Multiupload.com apparently self-shutdown. All my TOS caps gone there too. Meaning they aren’t now up anywhere. Except the ones that TrekCore have up.
Means I have to reupload everything 
Also means I don’t give a shit about people begging for zips/rars this time – if they can’t deal with galleries, that’s their problem.
So here we are, present.
Next mile marker – July 2012. TNG season 1 comes out and Bluray and I’m ecstatic that my finances (for once) allow me to buy it! 
Because everything I hear from CBS etc. the sales of this set will have a huge impact on the possibility of remastered future TNG, DS9 and Voyager. They want to give us all of Star Trek in HD, but we have to show them we want them in HD by putting our money where our mouth is! Which, I guess is logical 
Next mile marker – August 2015. Another huge one. Hollywood/Fan-sites.org which has been hosting the site since 2009 and which owns my domain trekcaps.net, announces they are shutting down their hosting service and also keeping the domain name. This means trekcaps.net and all my other sites sites need to find a new host in within one month.
I bought the domain name star-trek.info and flaunt.nu agrees to host us. Thankfully they were able to transfer the site cPanel to cPanel so I didn’t need to download and then reupload almost 30GB worth of stuff for this site.
October 2017 – Move to new host. My old host flaunt.nu changed their ad requirements to all galleries must have 3 ads, and ads them without warning to all galleries. So that’s 3 ads in TOS, and 3 ads in TNG and 3 ads in each of the series galleries and I think that’s just too much. Combined with that and my desire to reduce the number of my websites/get rid of all of them, I decide to move all the sites I want to keep to my personal hosting account. I’ll host this site for as long as I still want to do that, and can. But I don’t want the outside pressures on update schedules, various rules and having lots of ads etc. that come from hosting with free hosts. I’m very happy and thankful they exist, though! They’ve been life savers several times over the years!
September 2017. Added DSC gallery and started screencapping the first season as it aired.
February-March 2018. Server disaster caused by my host’s data center. Restoring backups and re-uploading took about a month. I activated HTTPS across the domain.
Next mile marker – mid-2018. Upgraded my internet connection. Uploading one episode of screencaps now takes 5-10 minutes (instead of the hour or two it took before), and I find myself wanting to work more on the site. So I step up my TNG screencaps uploads.
January 2019. Re-capped DSC from Bluray and replaced the old screencaps in the DSC gallery.
Next mile marker – April 2019. Finished capping TNG from Bluray, and the TNG movies from Bluray a few days later in early May. DS9 still not out on Bluray, so decide to start capping it from DVD.