ViewBug

My passion for photography went up the moment I joined Viewbug! The encouragement, the support, the motivation, the inspiration that I have gained since becoming part of this web site is amazing. One can view incredible art from experienced professionals all the way to impassioned novices like me. The great thing is the variety of connections on this site: LIKES, VIEWS, PEER AWARDS, CONTESTS. You can be as "meek" and quiet on the site, or give awards, follow others, communicate privately (IE like FB or LinkedIn). Your own site has a moving slideshow. It is an impressive interface. Any questions that I have had are answered by VB staff to my e-mail. It's as much fun as the social media sites that get all the attention. Only it is geared completely to photography. I'd spend hours on this per day if I had time!

This sight pays 150.00 - I like this sight because you can upload as many as 100 photos, videos or music files at a time, plus they have photo challenge contests and you can win cash prizes up to 150.00 they also have doodle contests, and weekly contests, its a great sight to store some of your photos, and when theres a challenge you want to enter its easy just to upload from your photos, already on the sight. You even get reward points for uploading your photos andmany other things, check it out.

I joined only three months ago. I haven't even uploaded a photo yet and I've received over 75 emails from them asking me to upgrade. I receive one of these emails on nearly a daily basis! These schmucks just want my money! I've even had people sending me "friend requests", then start bugging me to upgrade. I guess you get points if you get someone to upgrade. I cancelled my account.

Its okay, not particularly cheap for what it does which essentially is a place to load photos youve taken (sure theres the inspiration element but if thats it - its expensive). Youll get people following you and you do the same but this Eventually feels like a number for vanitys sake - you get the occasional comment, like and award but so what. I honestly never felt it was anything more than just people looking for a return like... The competitions are fun but theres something odd with the results - difficult to put your finger on but something doesnt always add up. I had fun for a year but at £80 its not something I would bother with again. Im sure most people will have fun with this but the appeal is really limited however I really wish Id of thought of it because it must be generating significant revenue for somebody. Good luck - have fun with it but I reckon youll feel the same way after a few months. All in all it a bit meh.

I have been a member for almost 2 years. Last month I took a photography course and finally I feel comfortable entering photo contests, have to say never have I seen such a cool contest site so I decided to upgrade my account and now I am joining all contests and I have received such positive feedback that I am more addicted to photography.

I can't believe how much my photography has improved since joining ViewBug. The tutorials and feedback from the community have helped me see things in a whole new light.

Love sharing my photos with other ViewBug member's! Great site to meet fellow photographers, learn from others and have fun participating in contests.
If you are a photographer, this site is a must!

The ViewBug community is simply amazing! I have made friends with photographers from around the world and their encouragement has motivated me to keep pushing my boundaries. Everyone is supportive

This really isn't just sour grapes but there's clearly far too many junk photo's getting into competitions. Too many good ones are being overlooked, and too many rubbish ones beating those good ones.
The latest competition I saw has a finalist photo with an item badly superimposed over a background, with differing lighting, shadows and bits missing from it. This was a FINALIST photo out of nearly 6000 lol!
As someone else pointed out below, it's clearly who you know here, rather than your skill level.

I'm also a member of a photograph club (150+ members) where most others joined too. We all get the same emails, for example everyone's most viewed photo received a Spring Selection Reward, most of us had our most viewed photo with an animal entered into the Animal Kingdom competition, we often receive likes/awards from the same person (automated? Bots?), and some members who have deleted their accounts still receive emails saying they've had more likes or peer awards! Work that one out!

Unfortunately I paid for 2 years, but will now be requesting my money back.

***Update and response to ViewBug***

Thanks for the copy&paste reply Viewbug, it's the same one as you sent me via email. At least you were good enough to give me my money back and downgrade my account.

I understand that you have to tow the official line, and try to make it look like there's nothing wrong, but with many people leaving your service, some for the issues raised here, surely it's time for you to change your site?

Until that happens, I for one, am out.

So much to do with my photos! I made my first sale on the viewbug gigs cannot believe it. My buddy receive a new gopro camera for winning a sports related contest hope I'm next

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.

Another joke of an amateur photo sharing site. Just look at the layout, my dog has more design sense. Smarten up, stay safe, stay alert and avoid this site at all costs.

A great site for sharing your Art! - So far from what I have seen from the site its going to be fun! Lots of really cool images and people with great talent!

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!

I upgraded to PRO and registered my own domain with the included handy website option, while I see the payments and number of invoices in my profile settings (but no chance to download invoices from the website), assistance said they do not release invoices and say that they sent me billing e-mails which I never got. As a pro I need some receipt I can use for my accountancy and I won't renew PRO if they don't sort this out!

A wonderful place to display your photos, receive and give awards, enter contests and communicate with like minded people. Everything is happy to help you develop your skills. I love it.

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!