Mick W.

And that tells you all you need to know. Some of the articles are interesting (but largely available elsewhere), many are irrelevant to photography or just recycling other people's PR. You'll have to decide for yourself to what extent you trust the product reviews on a site owned by Amazon. There's a famous Ferengi mantra that may apply.

Recently deleted my account - which I had to do by sending them an email, and that gives you an idea how bad this site has become. They stopped adding new features years ago, it has been in constant decline ever since, and is plagued by bugs.

How can you run a site where members have no control over their own images? Unless you do it shortly after upload and before winning awards, you can't delete your own photos!

There are too many people gaming the system by re-uploading the same old images (or very subtle variations of them) time and time again, mis-voting to gain an advantage and other nonsense (encouraged by cash rewards). A shame, as its image-duel system had potential. Avoid.

Not the best of the photo competition sites, but not the worst either. Nice that it has competitions with prizes, but far too many clickbait emails and persistent notifications trying to get you to upgrade ($) to see your stats, enter off-limits competitions and gain other pointless social media-type benefits (ie, ones where you do the work and pay for the privilege). It has a ridiculous 'curator' system that encourages you to send pre-formed messages to complete strangers in order to get them to be more active. The UI is a bit bonkers, and makes it hard or impossible to see precisely how well you are doing or have done in challenges, how many votes you got, etc. Makes one wonder if there is deliberate obfuscation going on for some hidden purpose. Maybe the levels of user activity aren't as great as they like to imply.

Having been on this and other photo contest sites for several years, I think the biggest problem is that its peer image voting system (showing four photos of different sizes on a screen you have to scroll FCOL) simply doesn't work. Far too often the peer voted 'winner' in a challenge just isn't that good. This isn't sour grapes - it is an objective opinion that the site throws up poor images as winners far more often than other sites. This, again, suggests that the volume of voting isn't high enough for the magic 'algorithm' to work.