ViewBugReviews 249

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!

Viewbug is a lot of fun and provides inspiration and education. This site exhibits amazing talent, and I enjoy getting ideas from the other amazing photographers on this site. Every week, I look forward to seeing how my photos are doing in the contests. Great fun while learning how to improve my photography. Great combination!

I joined Viewbug a year ago and i, and those that have watched my progress, can honestly say that Viewbug has had a huge influence on my photography! There are all skill levels from serious proffesionals who display some fantastic art, to complete novices that have some of the best snapshots on life and the world around us.
Viewbug has helped me to push myself as a keen amature photographer and viewing such a wide range of styles, my skill level has come on in leaps and bounds! Thanks Viewbug!

I have now left viewbug.com as a member after being on the site for over one year. One of the reasons I have left was because when one of my images was stolen viewbug did nothing about it. Altho viewbug it's self was not very supportive the members that I met on the site were very supportive of each other. There were also some very strange things happening on the site like some new members going straight to ambassador the highest achievable level on the site. It normally takes one to two year to get to that level. When I deleted my account they didn' t ask me
Why even tho I had almost seven thousand followers and over six thousand awards. There are times that I think this site is run by one or two people. This site has a lot of work to make it a positive force for its members. But until it changes a lot I won't be a member.

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.

This site is actually a lot of fun, even for a professional. Art and photography are subjective, so this is by no means bible, its my point of view. I have seen some wonderful images on this site. Manipulation is part of photography and takes a lot of work to perfect, so for those of you that are complaining about these types of pics, learn the craft before you say its easy, or just a person clicking a button. Remember that its not the camera or how big your lens who takes great pictures, its the person using it.
I am a free member mostly to keep my social media aspect for my website. If I can have fun in the meantime, even better.

I really like this site for the learning experience and to get ideas for photoshoots. I like entering the contests to get an idea if the image is worth anything. I've NEVER won a contest yet... I doubt I ever will, if I do it will be very surprising. I've been a finalist several times and featured but nothing to get too excited over. Ive been a member for 2-3 years i think... IDK it's been a while. The one thing that keeps it from getting a 5th star from me is the reward points. They mean nothing. You can't redeem them for anything. They give you a free entry into a contest when you reach certain goal marks but you can't turn them in for anything... I would be cool if you could get a t-shirt or small momentos for the rewards. I've given up on trying to earn them. What's the point. I realize the points are easy to get, just make the items worth a lot of points then, and to certain level members make them worth less or discount them. I just think the reward points should either be cut out or improved with something worth working for...

This site is wonderful for sharing photos with others, but the problem is within the contests. There are all these amazing prizes that I used to get excited about but now I've realised an amateur like me with a Canon 100D could ever win them. The photos that people post to these contests are exceptional but clearly taken with very expensive cameras. So they'll probably get the prize and sell it off or give it to someone else. I really think that this voids the point of the contests. Also people who win resubmit their photo for the next contest and could still win. Us people who haven't got £3,000 to spare are getting buried under the professionals.

The people who run this site are totally clueless. They lure you in with the plethora of meaningless "rewards" - you get nothing for these alleged rewards. A Good portion of the photos posted are sub-amateurish although having said that there are some outstanding pros that habituate the site. Of course you get little unless you pay annual fees to use the site.

There are lots of issues with the software, too numerous to mention, but the one I dislike most is the ability to paste something that you cut from something that you wrote off-site that you might want to use as a photo description.

As an side, I am not a disgruntled user who never one any of their silly awards. As of this writing, I have "won" ******* of their alleged awards and have 5382 followers - IOW, my stuff was quite popular on the site.

I live in Florida and I am a nature photographer. This time of the year it is hot, humid, buggy and the creatures are in short supply, hence to amuse myself I started a Photoshop project of putting my dog in various scenes. For example, the photo attached shoes him as one of the lions at the New York City Library.

I got a note from the rocket scientists who run the site claiming that I was violating their rules - I guess the clowns have no sense of humor - they are too busy out there protecting illegal immigrants I guess. They indicated that after years of using the site, I must remove the offending photos. In that I have been disenchanted with them and their alleged support when I have had an issue and in that I have to pay a annual fee to perpetuate said disenchantment, I informed them that they simply could delete my account and the 5078 photos I had uploaded over the years. They were finally fast to comply with a request!

Interestingly, for a site for which you have to pay, if you ever lose the original of one of your photos and which to download another copy from your own portfolios on this ridiculous site, you are unable so to do. Conversely, on the photo site Flickr, which is a free site, one can download the any photo in its full size at any time and there is no cost so to do.

Oh and yes, on the free sites of 500PX, Pixoto, and Society6, where I have uploaded a fraction of those uploaded to ViewBug, I have sold many of my photos. The same ones were available on ViewBug, including many what have won major International photo contests, been published full page in major publications, and have even been displayed in the Louvre in Paris, and not a single one has sold in the years I have been there.

Bottom Line: The site is a total waste of your time and money - go elsewhere!

I am a very amateur photographer that discovered this site by accident. I own no photo editing software. The most editing I ever do is perhaps a bit of cropping and some changes to black & white or sepia and creativity is not really my thing either. After looking at the images posted on this site I am quite certain I will never, ever even come close to winning a competition. However, once I got past this reality I discovered that it's fun just to post photos and see what people have to say. So, I will continue to enjoy the beautiful work of others and take whatever compliments come my way.

I like the format of the site, what bothers me is how the original photo quality is degraded significantly by Viewbug. Example, here are 2 links to the exact same photo. It has been uploaded to Viewbug and also DA.
Viewbug
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/*******
DA
http://orig12.deviantart.net/1bca/f/2016/239/f/7/bomber_by_5bodyblade-dafjigi.jpg

Update: This update is in reply to ViewBug T. [ViewBug Rep]
The image from deviant art I posted is actually what you see if you choose to zoom in. I was trying not advertise the DA site, thats why I linked directly to what you are shown.
But here is the link with the DA borders etc
http://5bodyblade.deviantart.com/art/Beautiful-B17-*******

Now, what is really puzzling, when I click on the photo from viewbug's version, It does not zoom in and get clearer, it actually zooms out only, showing either the "compressed version" or a smaller "compressed version"
https://www.viewbug.com/photo/*******

The photo never becomes better than "compressed"
I totally understand why images are compressed (saves space)
Also, thank you for taking time to talk about the issue. Again, I really like the format of the site, I just feel let down by image quality. Maybe I am missing something, but as far as I can tell, the view is always presented with the compressed image, with no way to zoom in or view the photo in better detail.
Thanks.

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.

Since I'm a member of ViewBug, I have been doing better day after day. Their contests are truly motivating and the results always inspiring. The prizes are true, the exposure works and you can make friends sharing photos and commenting on others' walls and works. One of my favourite websites so far.