Jose G.

Outstanding international photo contest site. It is also a useful social network for photographers, both amateurs and pro. This is one of the best sites you can find of photography contest, and for validating and evaluating the quality of your photos among peers and learn from them. Of course there are some improvements that I would suggest to Viewbug, like the voting system within the contests, that is not very agile. But regardless the number of votes a photo receives during the contest's voting period, at the end the contest awards are always granted by a professional photographer or by a jury.

I am a member of Viewbug since 2014 and I am writing this review in March 2017. In these three years very few of my photos were selected as finalists in the hundreds of contests that I participated. The photographic level of the contenders is so high that winning a contest seems impossible for me, as I just have the level of an enthusiast photograper. But you can find inspiration and learn a lot from other Viewbug members, especially from the winners and finalist of each contest.

Beyond the contests, thanks to Viewbug's Peer Awards system, the site is a powerful tool for knowing the evaluation of your art by other passionate photographers (not by the general public). After having reviewed hundreds of winners and finalists and compare their statistics among them and with others (and also with my own statistics), my conclusion is that if around 20% or more of the visitors of a photo by members of Viewbug community give a Peer Award to it (after some contests and/or some weeks or months of exposure), probably you can say that the photo is a good one (that is, if at least 1/5 of the visitors give it a "Peer Award"). If a photo receives less that 15% Peer Awards from the Viewbug community visitors, its artistic appealing probably is more questionale. With the "Likes" the threashold for knowing if a photo is popular is around 33% (1/3 of viewers give it a Like). Although you always have to bear in mind that "popularity" is not all what matters in art (even Van Gogh was not "popular" at his time).

I am not a newcomer to the site and have a well-formed opinion about it compared to other sites. I am also a subscriber of several international photo contests sites, like Gurushots and Pixoto (and Flickr, Smugmug, Photoshelter, Alamy and Kizoa for other purposes). In my opinion they have worse functionalities than Viewbug. Here you can find my most-viewed photos at Viewbug: https://www.viewbug.com/member/GEFAELL#/GEFAELL/photos?sort=mostview