ViewBug

Winning contests isn't everything; it's the sense of belonging and encouragement that make it truly special. Great to be part of viewbug.

I'm overjoyed to get the opportunity to review ViewBug! This amazing tool has completely changed how I take and publish my photos. I've always had trouble finding a platform that meets my desire for inspiration and offers a passionate and encouraging community because I'm a beginner. Indeed, ViewBug has exceeded all expectations!

First of all, the website's interface is really gorgeous. It is simple to use, visually pleasing, and navigable. In a matter of minutes, I was able to set up my profile and begin adding pictures. Because of the layout's modern simplicity, my work really pops.

Speaking of my work, ViewBug has given me a ton of chances to display my abilities. The platform's numerous challenges and competitions have improved my abilities and given me more visibility in the photographic community. Seeing that my images are being appreciated and praised by other photographers and even expert judges gives me a rush.

ViewBug's community component is really amazing. I have never come across a bunch of people that are so encouraging and supportive. Having the chance to network with other like-minded photographers, exchange advice, and get helpful criticism has helped me take my photography to new levels. Knowing that there is always someone rooting for me and acknowledging my achievements makes me feel good.

Moreover, the ViewBug team has demonstrated remarkable responsiveness and attentiveness towards user input. In order to maintain the highest quality of experience, they are always updating and enhancing the platform in response to customer feedback. Their genuine desire to create a healthy and flourishing atmosphere, coupled with their passion for photography, is evident in their level of dedication and commitment to their community.

In order for the "professional judge" to even see the finalist photos (generally about 50 or so I believe), the photos must first be rated as the most popular by the viewbug members. When I joined I took this to heart and tried to participate by rating photos. One contest ending this week already has over 28,000 entries and presumably will end with approximately 30,000 entries. Viewbug's voting process requires you to view 4 photos per page and choose the top one or two (or none) on each page. 30,000 entries would be 7500 pages. Assuming a minimum fair appraisal time of 10 seconds per page that is equivalent to about 21 HOURS of non-stop viewing/voting. So if you dedicated yourself to this as you would a full-time job (8 hours of work per day) it would take almost three days (assuming lunch and time-out breaks) to vote on ONE contest. Keep in mind that there are contest closing virtually every day... so it is literally impossible to try to participate in voting on them. So, what inevitably must be happening is good-hearted folks start the process, vote on some photos for an hour or so, get bored and more on to something more meaningful in their lives. Thereby voting for whatever photos were in the first few hundred pages... and never seeing the remaining thousands of pages where the top photos likely lurk. Perhaps I am missing something and the process doesn't really work this way. If so, I would love to hear how it really works.

Viewbug has no concern for it's members. When the site was free, it was much better because there was no limit on anything. I created 140 groups. Now each member is limited to 3 groups. Contest prizes used to be as much as $500. Now you received t-shirts and worthless stuff instead. On rare occasion there may be a prize of 50 or 100 dollars. There are at least 250,000 entries. Most winning photos are horrible, the results of unskilled photographers, and/or just downright nothing.

For those of you that are new to the site, and think it's so good, just give it time. Many of my friends thought it was great at first. Now they are on other sites that are at least honest and don't draw winning contest photos out of an electronic hat. Seriously, anyone would know 300,000 photos are not going to all be looked at.

As a general rule I'm very positive, and am a happy person. However, it has been a nightmare the way Viewbug has ignored problems and ignored members. About 100 of my friends are more than disenchanted with the site. Most of them have awesome photos yet never win contests or have a photo featured. I'm doing this for them. Many have had to block other members that harassed them. They can at least feel some consolation that a friend is telling the truth about Viewbug.

A free site that focuses on selling your photos is RedBubble. If you hope to sell your photos on Viewbug, it is unlikely it will happen. Out of 300 Viewbug friends, 2 have sold one photo each. Viewbug focuses on getting the $60 membership. Everything else is secondary.

Love the community, people have been so friendly and I've been able to access very nice rewards for free. I don't expect to win a contest but they give you a lot of motivation to keep participating.

I have really enjoyed viewbug since I first created my account. I would like to know if coin prizes will renew any time soon? I think refreshing them would be a great incentive for us members!

So I've been a member of Viewbug for a year, and have many awards, etc. I was recently ranked in the top 10 class out of 198,252 images (Natural World Photo Contest). I started thinking about what this actually meant.

If I rank ahead of 190,000 images, and people are voting by displaying 4 images per screen, then you would need 800,000 page views to even have the photos looked at once. I would expect to have my images viewed at least 10 times, so that would be 8,000,000 page views for all of the photos. I doubt that all of the photos are even looked at more than once. Tech support has never told me how many views my images got in this contest. Since they refuse to answer this question, then this is looking like a contest that is based on just a few, if any views. I suggest that VB become more transparent in this regard so that their paying subscribers can decide if this is actually a contest or a lottery or some automated system based on... something. If you are taking my money and giving out prizes as part of a contest, then you need to tell me how the contest is determined.

Viewbug needs to answer the question: Are ALL of the photos in a contest displayed at least once for voting? If not, then how do you decide which photos get displayed? What is the average number of views per photo per contest. My point is, given the large volume of images, it seems unlikely that all of the photos are viewed even once which makes this more of a lottery than a contest.

Been a member since last November, great community, good educational material available to members. Some of the photos you have access to view, are absolutely stunning.
I question their integrity in the rewards program. Rewards for most achievements are more points, which are awarded promptly. There are a few perks along the way, like extra entries into contests, but otherwise, just points! The big one that appealed to me was Ambassador level, which came with a "Swag Bag". I can find nothing about it on their site anymore, so maybe it is gone. To achieve this, you needed 500k points. When I finally achieved it, nothing! No congratulatory email, I mean nothing! After 3 months of correspondence with them, they finally slammed the door on me. So what did I finally get for my "bag"? A "mini pixie" tripod, available on line at $15-30! And one year additional membership for the inconvenience.
As I read through the emails, the wording is quite clear, until the latter end, when they added a "what we meant was" qualifier!
If you have issues, my experience is that it will go in their favor right or wrong! They have only email correspondence with the Help team, and based on my experience, it's more to deflect, than help.
This brings into question so much more! Do contest winners ever receive their awards, looms large.
If you want a good hangout, where you can have your ego stroked, and learn a bit about improving your skills, this will work well. If you want integrity and an honest bonus system, not so much!

I just started taking photos not too long ago when I found this site. I love the page, I really do. I also like that contests are for everybody, so I can join them. It makes me happy to know people are actually looking at my photos and LIKING them! So yeah, no complaints there. However, I was wondering why that Viewbug doesn't keep you up to date on where you are rated until the contest's over. I get these random emails, occasionally, about how I'm in the running to be crowned, but I'm not sure where that puts me in the running for top few pictures.

And the fact that you don't get your exact rating also bothers me. My contests simply say that I was in the top... Let's say eighty, fifty, or thirty, like three of mine, for my photo. It bothers me that I don't know who the others participating are, or what rank I am. I'd like to see that, so I can see who I lost to, and who I beat. If only to improve myself for the next contest. I really want to know what my ratings were, or currently ARE for the contests I'm in. Any chance you can tell me why you don't tell me that information?

I've been a member for several years now. Every other day I'm getting a stupid email stating that I've gotten another award, stating that there's a special message from me which is actually just trying to trick me into purchasing a pro membership. I get messages saying They picked my photo to go into some competition or something but when I click a link nothing has ever been selected it's always them scamming. I've gone into the email settings and I have everything deselected. So I should receive absolutely no emails from these annoying scammers.

Yet for over a year I'm still receiving crap from them. EVERY! Time I get an email from these scammers I click on unsubscribe and everything in the unsubscribe list is already unsubscribed yet I'm still receiving tons of spam from these scammers.

They are just doing a numbers game. If they can try and scam one person multiple times and fail then they've wasted their time. But using technology like emails they can scam 1 million people a day and only need 1% of that million people to fall for their BS and they are making a fortune.

This world needs one of two things. It needs a Internet police that can go after despicable scammers like this that try to trick innocent people or some good hackers that can track these dogs down and let us all know where they are.

I joined believing it to be a community for photographers to share feedback with each other. Paid for Premium membership too... waste of money. Every single day I have creepy scammers private messaging me asking for my email address and suggesting we communicate on Hang Out or such like. I have identified pictures stolen from other sites but there does not seem to be a way to report this kind of copyright theft.
At first I thought it was OK to be a Curator but quickly realised that it is just a system for gaining points which earn you pointless badges with no real meaning.
A Curator is asked repeatedly to "Award All" to sets of 4 photographs. Once that task is done you are asked to Follow a set of photographers and to send Invites and Messages to other users. These are generic and button pressing operations.
What is the point in "following" 20 new photographers every day when you are unable to look back through a directory to see who you are following? It is just a way to earn points.
There are too many photos of half clad and naked females for my taste and between that and the scammers I now find visiting view bug on a daily basis very depressing instead of the joy I was hoping for. It has an aura of sleaziness about it.
I just want to close my Account but I cannot find the relevant area to do that. The advice is either out of date of spurious.
A waste of time if you are serious about your craft. Stay away!

I have been a member of Viewbug since August 2016. I have been very pleased with the site, aside from a few issues I've brought up before, and clarifications that still haven't been made to my satisfaction, and from reading here, other people's satisfaction as well. One thing that really "bugs" me is the lack of definition for awards we can give to others. What is the meaning and difference between giving someone a "top choice" award versus "all star", for example? Those definitions and differences continue to be unclear to me! Another experience I've had, which someone else here complained about, is that I, too have had the same photos pop up in different trifectas when voting in a contest. What is happening with that? Why are one or two photos in a contest continuing to be repeated in different trifectas I'm being shown? Also, Viewbug needs to add a "clear" button. I agree with another reviewer on here that the buttons are sensitive - I too have accidentally given a peer award when I wanted to give more! Can a clear button be added to erase this sort of mistake and give a person the higher award they deserve? Other than that, I am overall very pleased with Viewbug. Once some of these issues are answered and resolved, I think I will be happy to give Viewbug 5 stars!

I joined ViewBug about four years ago, back when I first got into photography. About a year before I even got my first "real" camera, when I was still using my cellphone to take photos. I was going through a very difficult time in my life and photography literally saved my life. ViewBug gave me a good place to look through thousands of images, talk with other members and learn more about photography. I actually won a contest this year and have won several contest finalist, along with many challenges. ViewBug has helped me, and continues to help me become a better photographer as time goes on. I know that I still have a lot to learn, and there is always room for improvement, but I know that I wouldn't be at the level I'm at as a photographer, without ViewBug. I have made several good friends on the site and the staff has always been beyond helpful, understanding and professional in every single email exchange I've had with the them. I'm actually very thankful for the site. I see many bad reviews on here, but to me, ViewBug is just like anything else in life, you get what you put in to it. I also wanted to mention that although ViewBug is a huge site with hundreds of thousands of members, they still have a way of making you feel special and cared about. And before I end this. If anyone from ViewBug reads this, I want to give you a huge thank you for all of the hard work that you do to provide such an amazing website for me and other photographers like me. To me there isn't a better photography site out there, that accomplishes everything that ViewBug does. So again, thank you, for everything!

Im reading through reviews for viewbug and getting really annoyed. Loads are very positive and thats very good because it shows that viewbug delivers on prizes and stuff. But there are two types of complainers in these reviews in my opinion.
Type one - cant win a competition so spends their whole review saying its fixed bla bla bla.
Type 2 - thinks they are professional and therefore is putting everyone's images down saying that everything is bad or extremely low quality.
My opinion- yes there are a lot of lower quality images on there however some people cant afford cameras and equipment that will give them top images or they dont have the experience to take good images.
Viewbug isnt about having lots of professionals being amazing with no low quality images at all. It's about learning and appreciating the art of photography, this includes sharing lower quality images to receive feedback and help improving them. Therefore it is an amazing site that works very well. Personally i have spent many hours on this site and can't seem to get off it. I would like to thank viewbug for that. I am finally inspired to explore different types of photography to the studio work i usually do and i appreciate that a lot.

I've been a Viewbug member for many years and purchased the Pro+ subscription back when it was the highest level of pay categories. Now there are different levels and Pro+ is the lowest paid category. Viewbug promises a lot of exposure that never seems to happen. I was drawn to Viewbug because of all the contests and challenges. I've entered hundreds of contests and challenges, yet often times there is little to no evidence that a judge (or maybe anyone) ever even saw my photos. Never won anything, but tbh I really don't care about that. Most of the times, the winning image is stellar and way better than mine. In the early days, one could earn points for participating--load a photo, give an award to another photographer's image, vote on contest entries, enter a contest, etc. The more you participated, the more points you earned. Nothing really happened with those points though. It didn't earn you anything. Now you can earn coins for the first award you make or first photo you upload or first contest you enter, etc. You can actually exchange your coins for some decent prizes. I used coins to buy Microsoft Office for my new laptop. Unfortunately, I feel that was a bit of a scam because I was never able to get my license code to work, even when Viewbug gave me another code after I complained. I ended up having to purchase Microsoft Office anyway. I basically think this entire website is just for whoever created it to make money from member fees. There is really absolutely NOTHING you get in return for your money or your time. There are better places to share photos and receive real feedback. I have now cancelled my paid membership and vow never again to get duped by this kind of thing.