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What Is GuruShots? Is It Worth It? Your 15 Burning Questions (Answered!)
Look:
If you’re looking for a photography-specific platform, then you may look into GuruShots – a fun game with daily challenges and rewards for photographers.
It is a worldwide photo contest, and it’s an interesting way to challenge yourself, to step up your photography game, get exposure, and meet like-minded folks in this community.
Now…
In this article, it won’t be exactly a GuruShots review, but rather some of the frequently asked questions you may have about this platform and will offer you more insights into it.
You’ll also have answer to your questions like:
- How does GuruShots work?
- Is GuruShots worth it?
- Is GuruShots legit?
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
What Is GuruShots?
First things first, check out the video below to understand what is GuruShots.com about:
What Is GuruShots?
GuruShots is like a mix of a photo contest and a social game.
You join themed challenges, upload your photos, and other users vote on them. The more votes you get, the higher you climb the ranks, and winners can score some nice prizes.
Their system tries to keep things fair by showing all entries to about the same number of people, no matter when you join the challenge.
That said, things can get pretty competitive. If you want more visibility, you can pay for features like “fills” to boost exposure or “swaps” to switch out a photo that’s not doing well.
It’s a bit of a pay-to-play setup, but still a fun way to get your work seen, especially with millions of people active each month.
Is GuruShots rigged?
The most straightforward answer is “No.”
Suppose you are a photographer looking forward to gaining exposure and validation for your work and determining your skill set against other artists while enjoying a game. In that case, GuruShots.com is the right platform for you.
As an online gaming platform for photographers, it emphasizes prize winning more than the participants’ talent. Competitors spend a lot of time on the website to increase their visibility.
Are you looking for an online space where you can gauge your photography artwork skills with another artist for fun? GuruShots cheats? Is GuruShots a con?
No, GuruShots app is legit. However, in a game, one has to compete to win competitively. GuruShots is a great start.
Now, here’s one of the common critiques you might come across:
There are numerous ways to expose your photography work without spending hours on the website voting to gain visibility. Furthermore, nobody cares about your award-winning budges outside of this website.
Some would argue (and shared their feelings) that it is just an illusion of space, and your photography work means nothing outside this URL. In the end, you just have an empty feeling as the virtual interaction bypasses anything that one considers socially fulfilling.
But a lot of folks actually DO enjoy this game-like social platform, and it’s a great way for beginners and enthusiasts to improve their photography skills.
Can you make money with GuruShots?
Are you an upcoming photographer looking for avenues to make extra cash? The simple and direct answer is “yes.” While Guru is not a platform for selling artwork, you can still make money.
It is a legit website that allows participants to compete and win big prizes. GuruShots is free to download the app. It has partnered with big brands like Skylum, Kodak, and Adobe, among others.
READ ALSO: Is PhotoJobz Legit or Scam?
How can you make money on Gurushots?
While the app is free to join, one has to pay to play. It is built on the premise that contestants have to pay to win. The more the fills, swaps, and keys, the higher your chances are for winning.
The participants upload a photo into the competition, which immediately gets many views. However, after reaching the set maximum, the views start slowing down or stopping until the maximum views are increased.
Also, bear in mind that the voted view differs from standard views.
The “voting view” is the number of times a photo has been viewed in a specific challenge. The standard view is displayed on the photo as the number of times a photo has been viewed on the platform.
What is the difference between the two?
The one with the most votes becomes the winner of a prize worth $300 or more.
==> Here are the 10 ways to make money with photography.
Can you make money with GuruShots?
GuruShots doesn’t pay you cash, but you can win cool prizes worth $300 or more from big names like Adobe and Kodak.
It’s more like scoring a really good raffle prize than earning a paycheck. You won’t be selling your photos here, so it’s not something you’d rely on to start a photography business.
Joining is free, but if you’re aiming to actually win, most people end up spending on boosts and features.
You might drop $10–20 chasing that $300 prize, which is kind of the nature of these platforms. There’s definitely value to be won, but it’s more about timing, strategy, and a bit of luck than any guaranteed reward.
How do you win GuruShots?
Have you joined GuruShots with the sole intention of winning big? Are you wondering what you can do to win?
First, remember that it is a game, and the chances of winning are slim. However, you can use some features on the site, like an exposure bonus. These will allow your photos to get noticed, resulting in more votes in the competition.
Other features like fill can assist in filling up your exposure level. The competitor with the most votes gets to win.
Check out this mini review of GuruShots by Michael Ronin, and how he thinks this platform could use some improvements:
How do you get more votes on GuruShots?
In the video above “Why GuruShots Sucks” by Michael Ronin, he mentioned the flaw with the voting system where your voting meter will increase if you vote POSITIVELY on images.
So many people might abuse this, and vote “yes” just for the sake of voting and having their own photos exposed. (Which is not exactly fair.)
In any case, here’s what people do to get more votes:
- Selective use of the out-fill option:
Choosing the right time to vote or using auto-fill is the best strategy to maximize your photos’ exposure level. Utilize your auto-fill feature during the day when competitors are looking at voting on photos on the platform.
- Take advantage of swaps:
Swapping at a specific time is the key to gaming and gaining the highest ranking. After swapping a new image to replace the existing one, the new one gets an exposure bonus, the same as your other existing photos.
- Reading and complying with the challenge guidelines:
Reading aims to ensure your photo complies with the competition guidelines.
- Upload high-quality photos:
To ensure you receive the highest votes on your images, you must ensure it’s of high quality.
Is GuruShots free?
Yes, GuruShots is a free app to download. It features millions of participants globally. Also, the app does not require any sort of membership fees to use. If you are an upcoming photographer looking forward to exposing your artistic work without spending GuruShots is your best option.
However, you must utilize some features to promote your work visibility on this platform. These are not free to use.
To unlock a single key that will allow you to boost one photo will cost $2.99. Five fills can expose all contest submissions to thousands of viewers at $1.99.
Lastly, if one of your photos is not receiving enough exposure, you can use swap. The feature allows you to swap one photo with another at $0.99.
Thus, while downloading and joining the platform is free, it will cost you some dollars depending on how much exposure you want for your work and if you are looking forward to winning big.
Not everyone feels positively about it though.
Check out the GuruShots review below by Stalemate Studios:
Does GuruShots own photos?
NO, GuruShots does not own photos. After uploading the photos, they end up in one’s gallery. The site preserves users’ right to maintain ownership of their photos.
It is similar to Instagram but lacks bio information and a website. GuruShots won’t add watermarks to the uploaded photos in an attempt to claim ownership in any way.
Another common question is: Does GuruShots buy photos?
GuruShots is not a platform for selling photos. The purpose of this site is for photographers to compete against each other on different subjects. As such, you cannot sell nor can the site buy any photos.
How many people use GuruShots?
GuruShots users include both males and females. While the highest number of users are between 20 and 40 years, some are in their 60s using this website.
The total number of users voting multiple times a month on this platform is 4 million. That’s quite an audience for your artwork.
While a virtual connection is excellent for today’s business, humans still crave physical connection. To that effect, this platform hosts at least five real-life exhibitions for its users each month.
What happens when you become a guru on GuruShots?
The privilege of running themed challenges comes with great responsibility for the community.
As a guru, you can create your contests and decide on the winner. If you become one in GuruShots, you have the privilege of running challenges and are in a position to issue Guru’s picks and Guru’s top picks.
Now, how do you become a guru?
As the competition is running, the guru pro creator will select a few of the best pictures.
If your picture gets selected, it earns 50 votes, increasing your chances of becoming a guru. Also, you are a guiding light of inspiration that ensures all members earn the same amount of exposure and experience.
How does the GuruShots algorithm work?
The site uses an algorithm ensuring that each submitted photo gets equal exposure regardless of when it was uploaded during the challenge. The equal opportunity that each participant receives makes this game reliable and legit.
How does this algorithm work?
After a participant uploads a photo or photos in the challenge, the voting system ensures that all photos receive the same number of views. Thus, regardless of whether you upload at the beginning or the end, all photos will enjoy the same exposure.
However, the maximum views are dynamic and change as the challenge progresses.
After uploading a photo into the challenge, you will realize a drastic increase in the number of views until the maximum. After reaching the current maximum at that point, the exposure will slow down until the maximum amount of views is increased.
What is the best time to boost in GuruShots?
Boosts allow the challenge participants to gain a lot of exposure to a particular photo. Usually, they are locked during the challenge and only open randomly once during the challenge.
The free boost only unlocks for members who have joined the challenge before 25% of the challenge time has erupted or before the first 24 hours have ended.
Thus, the best time to use the boost is to join during the stated period and swap a lot. Suppose the photo gets to the top, swap 12 hours and 6 hours before the four photo challenges and six a single photo challenge, respectively.
If you join too late, you might miss the free boosts requiring you to use a key.
However, in a 4 photo challenge, do not fill the exposure after the swap; instead, swap back 8 minutes before the challenge ends and fill the exposure only after the votes have stopped.
How do you get Guru picks?
Guru picks a little star icon that appears on your photo. This means that your voted photo receives 50 votes. Also, your photo has been selected as a winner of the Guru top pick award.
How do you get guru picks? You only receive these after a challenge guru votes for your photo.
How do you level up in GuruShots?
While participating in a challenge, you receive a level depending on the number of votes your photo receives.
For instance, 50 votes earn you a popular level, and a skill level is 200 votes, etc. In this case, you level up by earning points and getting noticed by the photographer, and receiving specific awards.
Speaking of…
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Is GuruShots Worth It? Conclusion
Without a doubt, there are pros and cons to GuruShots.com platform.
Some people love it for the challenges and opportunity to win prizes/make money with photography they take; others don’t really like the voting system, or the fact that you can’t get a constructive feedback.
Either way, the only way to find out whether you’ll like it or not, is to trying it and seeing it for yourself!
Now, I’d like to hear from YOU:
- What are your thoughts on this platform/game?
- Have you ever played it before?
- Is GuruShots worth it?
- Would you like us to create an actual GuruShots review or does this FAQ page suffice?
Let us know in the comments below!
About Author
Zarina
Founder & content creator at Digital World Beauty. My main objective here is to create a valuable resource for photography enthusiasts with honest tech reviews, course recommendations, and how-to tutorials.
Gurushots is a scam. Not only it is a scam, it has nothing to do with photography. It is a money laundering scheme for Russian – Israeli mafia. Just look into their investors, Altair and Buran: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gurushots.
Winning the game has nothing to do with how good your photos are. Best photos never win. The same small group of people wins most challenges, because they learned how to manipulate the rigged system best and when exactly to enter, boost, swap and fill. Those people spend 24/7 playing the game. They don’t have any photographs worth mentioning.
After I told the truth about Gurushots, number of people they are able to fool declined drastically. They used to run 40 challenges at the same time, now they run about 20. In retaliation they took away my guru’s right to run challenges. They do that to people they don’t like. It’s an incredibly small greedy group of people who are after you hard earned money. Don’t give them any.
Hi Strelok, thanks for sharing your experience. Sorry to hear about that.
I’ve heard that a lot of people learned how to manipulate the algorithm or play the GuruShots system, but couldn’t say anything with 100% certainty because I personally never participated in this game.
Now… I see those names as investors, but what makes you think they are the mafia group? It’s definitely not something that you can find in Google lol
Absolutely there are bots that have been placed in the game, often using images that are copywritten. I had one in my group and as soon as I reported them, their profile was deleted. The game is SO rigged and used as a crowd funding so the execs can go from country to country, exhibition to exhibition on the players dimes.
Eh! Sorry to hear about that, and thank you for sharing your experience, Raymond!
I love GuruShots. It’s a blast. It’s really given me a platform to showcase my photography and I’ve been displayed in multiple photography galleries and magazines because of GuruShots. I always make sure to market this as well on my social media and website. I use the free boost and I just vote to get my exposure meter up. You don’t have to pay to play at all. Like anything else in life, you are rewarded for the effort and time that you put in. The person that made the negative comments above seems very bitter and negative. Maybe just work on your photography craft more?
Hi Nate. So far, the reviews are mixed – some hate it now, some love it. You’re clearly in the second camp. Thank you for sharing your experience with GuruShots! Appreciate it 🙂
I Totally agree with Strelok. I played for a few years, reached Guru status (so I’m not grumbling because I don’t win) and then noticed a few things.
The first thing was that the same small group of players were consistently winning games with very average images. So I followed them and studied their game play over about 6 months.
What I found was they were swapping and boosting a new image then, filling the meter around 5-10 minutes before they game. This is playing the algorithms. Without going into detail, basically they do this to get the maximum amount of votes at the end of the game for that image. You only need one image to get the most votes and you win the competition even if all their images in that comp are below standard.
Second thing: I had a team (one that wins consistently) ask me to join them. The guru said and I quote: “I will teach you how to be a multi-winner”. The context of the conversation was that I had good images and they wanted me to join the team and win more comps.
I declined because I got the vibe that they were ‘recruiting players’. Honestly, after my research, I left and joined another photography game which is fantastic. Once the competition you have entered starts voting, you can not change your image. It comes down to the judges vote and then the crowds votes. Extremely fair system 🙂
Thanks for sharing, Bilstar!
I’m sure it’ll be useful to a lot of people who are thinking of joining GuruShots or are a part of it, but wonder how honest/legit it is.
What other photography game have you ended up joining? Please do share with us 🙂
Appreciate you stopping by!
what photography game is that? I agree with your observations. I have played GuruShots for 3 year and am on a pretty good team we don’t cheat or waste tons of money on swaps. But we have seen lots of cheating on the platform.
I have been a Guru in Gurushots for a few years. The platform has problems, but what platform doesn’t?
The negative comments above are basically useless for anyone looking for a fair and balanced view of the game. Basically the commenters don’t know what they are talking about, and seem to have personal problems from eating sour grapes.
I know those grapes, I have eaten them too. But I know how to play, and I have had multiple competition wins and gallery exhibitions. I know the problems and issues very well, but the benefits of the game have greatly outweighed the problems for me.
The game does exist to make money for its investors, as all businesses are. That by no means makes it a scam. But all of my competition wins have been cost free for me. It can indeed be played… and won… Totally free.
Hi Lynn,
Thanks for sharing your experience as a Guru in GuruShots! It’s awesome to hear that you’ve had success on the platform.
We agree that every platform has some issues, but we also think it’s important to hear both positive and negative feedback to make informed decisions. So, while we appreciate your positive outlook, we also welcome other people’s opinions, even if they’re not as positive as yours.
Thanks for commenting! I always love to hear from our readers 🙂
I’ve been around for a while and never bought “swaps”, “boost” or anything else to become a guru. Since I like to take photos but am not familiar with the technical details of photo editing, I did not strive for guru status in the first place. Currently I have “Champion” status and am actually proud of it. What bothers me about gurushots is the high level of anonymity. I received countless automated emails with the title “Congratulations” and “Likes”. Because of the high anonymity, I don’t think you can become famous through Gurushots.
Hi Peter, thank you for sharing your experience with GuruShots!
Yours is actually more positive compared to other folks who left a comment here, and had a different concern instead of “GuruShots cheats or rigged” type of comments 🙂
It’s a joke, the algorithm encourages cheating. Stop calling it a photo contest. I have had several top contenders in the “contest”, only to have Gurushots basically remove them from the contest for a period of time thus encouraging others to cheat. There is nothing fair or honest about this platform.
Hi Richard,
A lot of people shared their disappointment with Gurushots. Sorry you also had an unpleasant experience. And thank you for sharing it here!
Did you, by any chance, find another photo game?
The more I play this game the more I believe it is not legit. If you look at top 50 winners of each challenge, you see that they are almost alway “guru’s”. I bacame a master within a couple of weeks due mostly to the fact that I have been a professional photographer for almost 40 years. My images have won numerous awards and are published. They far surpass those posted by 75% of the gurus yet the highest I have ever reached is 50th. Most times it is lower. I have to agree it is more about playing the game rather than being a good photographer because I have seen some very poor and amateurish photos rank higher than mine. I have about 10 challenges running and when they are done, so am I.
Thank you for sharing your opinion/experience on GuruShots, Scott!
I am a level 5 guru now and I still enjoy the game. What many seem to forget is Gurushots is a game it is not (just) a photography competition. So like any game there are right and wrong times to do things, right and wrong ways to use the tools the game gives you.
You ask “is Guru shots worth it” that depends on your definition of worth, if you think your going to win fame and money then, no, there are other routes to that within photography. If you mean is it worth spending any money on then I would say not really, all spending does is enables you to do things a little quicker (at most), I learnt this early on before I was a Master and stopped spending any money on the game.
If you want to learn the game with out spending any money to experiment then find a good team, and learn from other players that know what their doing, be aware if they say you must spend x amount a week, or a month to get a win or move up in levels, then they don’t really know what they’re doing find another team to learn from.
Hi Merrill, you have a point. Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts on GuruShots app!