A Look at YouPic Pro

A Look at YouPic Pro

With an ever-expanding selection of community-based services and subscriptions to choose from, it can be difficult to find a platform that feels like your own and where your rights as a photographer are respected and protected. Let's dig into dig into why YouPic has grown into one of the most trusted home for photographers, and why celebrated and respected names such as Steve McCurry, Joel Meyerowitz, Adam Hinton, and David Yarrow utilize YouPic Pro's subscription in their photography work.


Once you visit YouPic.com, you will instantly feel the love on the site with a community that currently consists of over 3.7 million users from all over the world. It is the perfect tool for professionals as well as beginners as it offers the possibility to get international exposure for your work, grow your brand, find clients, learn key skills, meet new people, be inspired, and evolve as a photographer, both professionally and artistically.

YouPic offers the ultimate platform for those who want to fully embrace the art of photography without being interrupted by advertisements or worry about your personal data being sold. It seems like there's intentionality behind each picture that's shared rather than mass postings that are common on other photo-based social media platforms. It seems like YouPic takes its users seriously as well, which is reflected on Trustpilot, where YouPic is rated higher than Flickr and 500px.

One of the many things that reflects this trust is that YouPic views copyright as the most important issue of all photography-related questions. You do not have to be wary regarding the rights to your work when posting it to YouPic since they never claim the rights to your images. Your work will always be yours.

One thing I appreciate about the site is that is solidly designed and is one of the strongest technical platforms for images. You can upload and display high-resolution images faster than some of the largest companies in the world (tip: try Google images vs. YouPic and hold the space key to compare image load times).

With YouPic Pro subscription you gain access to features that are essential for the professional photographer. The subscription allows you to build your own custom domain, website, create a shop to sell you work and prints of your photos. The beauty of this is that it is connected to your YouPic account which means you can update your site very easily or set it to auto-update content for you. It will also boost your website with the organic traffic coming in to your personal website via YouPic. Additionally, you will keep all of your earned profit since YouPic has a 0% commission policy on all sales from your shop, the way it should be.

David Strauss's picture

David Strauss is a wedding photographer based in Charleston, SC.

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16 Comments

Thanks for the info, David. Nicely written article. From the perspective of such fledgling service it would be important to attract big names to its cause, so the article started precisely by naming them, thus establishing trust. Classic marketing at work. I am not against it, but I would rather see some prove of impact on average photog business practice if it is calculable at all...

YouPic has been a great tool for me in years bringing me new friends and clients.

Perhaps you can share your website as context on your comment. There is nothing on your profile here or images you've produced.

Hmm, Steve McCurry has 6 photos all posted a year ago, and his profile description is written in third person. Doesn't look like he personally use the account. Didn't check the other "celebrities"...
The site looks nice enough, but the right-click protection drives me mad. I constantly open pages in new tabs, and often use right-click context-menu to do that. But no can do on youpic.
Yes, I can ctrl-click to open a new page in tab (or in Firefox also hold down shift while right-clicking to prevent a site from overriding the context-menu). But when surfing photos I'm very often in a relaxed position with hands far away from keyboard.
But I guess some will love the "right-click protection". Just not me.

Scroll wheel click my friend. I comb through the web in new tabs too and I just use the scroll wheel click to open them.

Ahh, that works too. Clever. Thanks :-)

OMG that is the best tip ever. How did I not know about scroll wheel click! Thanks!!

I welcome more options in this space, but I wish the article went into a bit more depth than this short, advertisement-feeling piece. Also this just sounds like scare-language "You do not have to be wary regarding the rights to your work when posting it to YouPic since they never claim the rights to your images. Your work will always be yours" Yeah, like pretty much every other site too. It's like of like the old xkcd joke: "Try our breakfast cereal. Contains no Asbestos!"

Agree. And furthermore, for a site (or article) that claims "photographer are respected and protected", it is strange that I don't find any copyright info preserved in the images displayed. It could be that it doesn't exists in users original uploaded version of those I have checked. But it looks like a pattern, so most likely site is stripping all exif from display-version of images.
Maybe we/I are a little hard and unfair with all this criticism(?) But when you do boldly claims being more protecting and respecting to photographers than other sites, you are asking for it...
And having credit and copyright info in images, are pretty important imho. Search engines don't care about "right-click protections". And Google actually also index it, and can show image credits directly on their search pages...

It is advertise. It says "Sponsored" on the article data

Fstoppers should be ashamed of advertising SCAMMERS!! look for the reviews online, and don't fall for it as I did.
YOUPIC is a SCAM, be AWARE!! look the online reviews of it!

If you read the fine print in their terms you grant them the right to not only use your content (images) but distribute it to third parties as they see fit. So yes you retain the copyright to the image but they are allowed to use it or sell it to someone else without compensating you. Lots of doublespeak and no protection for you. So this site is no different from 500px or any of the other sites. Here is the excerpt from their terms

The license granted to YouPic includes the right to use your Content fully or partially for promotional reasons and to distribute and redistribute your Content to other parties, web-sites, applications, and other entities, provided such Content is attributed to you in accordance with the credits (i.e. username, profile picture, photo title, descriptions, tags, and other accompanying information) if any and as appropriate, all as submitted to YouPic by you;

Youpic like 500px doesn't work and is completely based on favouritism.

You can tell by looking at the quality of comment user write on each other photos (like nice one, great work ,etc). Basically useless comments.

Quantity is over quality just to give you an example (there are many like this one) this is on the HOT photos ???!??!?!

https://youpic.com/image/18104038/from-the-bottom-by-takashi-mizoguchi

The above photo seems to be taken with an IPhone from a bus

Youpic is just another photo storage website where quantity and profit drives everything!

In a superficial world where stuff like TicToc has become so popular i'm not impress about Youpic.

have you hear about 100asa.com ?

As a hobbyist photographer I have found YouPic to be a nice place to share my photos into a community other than Instagram, my two cents.

I've used YouPic for quite a few years and my experience with the community has been similar to what you described in the article. The search by genre is useful in looking for inspiration and ideas. It feels like the community size had been dropping in the last couple of years but I see most of the "old regulars" still there. But do you really need a million viewers to get value out of a site?

The subscription prices are at three levels which is to always easy to see. I question the value of the Pro level but have used the Premier level which does provide some useful tool for organizing your photos in albums etc.

I've only made one sale of an image on YouPIc and that had complications. I'm disappointed that some of the things (like competitions) that used to be on YouPic have gone. And there is no new instructional material. Seems the site was built up to a certain level and then handed over to robots or maintenance. There is a lack of news about what is going on - or there is nothing new going on at the site.

The greatest problems I have is the inconsistency in the curation of images and the difficulty in contacting support who generally do not respond. Or billing support which has NEVER RESPONDED. Although I like the community I have to warn anyone considering using it be careful. I have a former account there (in addition to my newer one) which I cannot access and I cannot get a refund for the PRO level I am paying on it!

WARNING: they do not honour their "money back" promise!