Gary R.

I have had a free account on Viewbug for a few years, now. I have no intention of ever "upgrading," as I know the site is all about making money, not about promoting my photos. My objectives in using Viewbug are probably very different from most of its users. I regard it as a free onliine portfolio of my best photos, and to that end, being limited to posting only 10 images per week has helped me to post only my best work by forcing me to be more selective about what I post. I use my Viewbug address on the cards I hand out to people I meet and, thus, it serves the function of an online portfolio on which anyone can see my work. I'm fairly certain that most of the views I get are coming from real people I either know personally, who know me, or from real people I have met, and most are not photographers, but that's fine because an audience of nothing but photographers will have a very different viewpoint than an audience composed of people from all walks of life. Anyway, as long as my cards are out there somewhere, I know that people are being exposed to my work and it is the exposure of my work to as broad an audience as possible that I am interested in, whether I ever hear from them or not. A "comment" like "Nice shot" or just a string of emojies is meaningless to me, but hearing genuine praise from people I have talked to face-to-face and can discuss my work with is far more edifying. As for Viewbug's focus upon contests, I couldn't care less. I know the lure of winning awards and so on is how they steer you toward buying a subscription and continuing to pay for it every year. I now have approaching 2,000 images on the site and I get spam from them daily aimed at getting me to subscribe. They have even resorted to giving me an additional 10 images for the week, as a bribe, an enticement to pay for a subscription. So, sure, I'll upload 10 more images, but I'm still not buying anything because there is nothing they are selling that is of any interest to me. I'm sure that, at some point, I'll reach some limit (I haven't heard of any, yet, though) on the maximum number of images I can have on my page, and if I do, that's fine. As long as it continues to be maintained, I'll continue sending traffic to my portfolio via my cards, email links, etc.