Last Updated on 04/16/2025 by Chris Gampat
It’s a Friday morning — the only time on VSCO CEO Eric Wittman’s schedule when we can get together for breakfast and to chat candidly. His is a story I know I need to tell because lots of modern photographers are often bedazzled by the grind that is typical social media. After coordinating with his staff, I chose to make it as convenient for him as possible and meet near his hotel. VSCO, to me, is genuinely one of the last companies that’s not trying to screw photographers over for a buck. Instead, they’re helping photographers make money and charging a sustainable price to help them do that.
Declaration of Journalistic Intent: VSCO has previously been an advertiser with the Phoblographer. However, this article is purely organic journalism. Contributing editing was done by Managing Editor Nilofer Khan.
I texted Eric to tell him that I was early and that he should take his time. I explain what I’m wearing and try to study images of what I look like. This is a tactic I used to use years ago when I was a paparazzi — it let me find people in a group pretty easily. We meet at Chelsea Market, and I get there early to see what’s actually open. We chat about my two eye surgeries, the recovery process that’s still ongoing, mediation, and so much more. Eric is from California, and I spare him the stall with breakfast burritos made on the East Coast. Instead, we get bagels from a smallish chain. He orders a toasted sesame with scallion cream cheese, and I order an untoasted everything with veggie cream cheese. The bagels are all right; I can tell that they were made more than 12 hours ago.
More Than Just Presets
He’s just getting back from the Wedding and Portrait Photography International Show in Vegas (WPPI). It’s the perfect trade show for the company, considering that tons of VSCO users, like Lauren Pelesky, shoot weddings and portraits. Eric tells me about people who spoke to him and still love VSCO presets. And it makes sense — VSCO actually shot the film and studied how images would be developed in different situations. Photographers like Alvaro Gil use the presets and the community to find inspiration. Rodrigo Oliveira, who often shoots film, loves the look of the editing possibilities.
Eric is one of many Adobe alums who came over to VSCO to help build something new for the community. After reminding me of everything they’ve done in the past two years, I have to admit that they’ve done one of the best jobs that I’ve seen in a while. VSCO, which is still a very small company, has made changes to its platform that rival the updates of companies far larger than them.
For the unenlightened, VSCO has done a lot in the past few years:
- They made VSCO Canvas, a moodboarding tool based off of AI and using images from the non-paying users of the VSCO community.
- VSCO made clarifications on a specific page about how they’re using AI.
- They worked on campaigns to promote the work of their members.
- VSCO Sites was launched — and is an easy way to convert your VSCO profile into a website
- VSCO Blogs was launched as a way for photographers to make themselves more SEO-rich.
- They did multiple diversity initiatives, and this has been ongoing.
- They keep launching presets
- VSCO Spaces is kind of like Flickr Groups, but much different.
- One of the best things VSCO did was VSCO Hub — a way for companies to find, hire, and license work from photographers.
I don’t say this very often about CEOs — at least the ones from the Japanese companies in the camera world tend to be very elusive. But in just around four years, Eric Wittman has helped build VSCO into something that every photographer should be pay attention to if they’re sick of being treated like a flick and a double tap on a news feed. What’s more, if you’re sick of needing to shoot videos and instead just wanted to be respected for the work that you do through organic connections, you should really be on VSCO.
We have a freezer filled with, like, old film, and we shoot it, and then we basically do a digital recreation of that.
Eric Wittman, CEO of VSCO
In the future, VSCO could even make a place where photographers could sell their own presets — especially since they work with so many creators on collabs of all sorts.
A Real Community Helping Real Photographers
If you’ve been a steady VSCO user for a while, much of what you see is probably unchanged — and in many ways, that’s a good thing. Your feed isn’t suddenly being polluted with reels, tons of random ads for every other post, loads of suggestions, etc. That’s all neatly separated for you. Photographers are still using it as a way to share their work and even as a way to collaborate and meet others who they can possibly work with.
“VSCO is a community platform,” Eric tells me. “We are not trying to be a social network. Our business model isn’t advertising, it’s a subscription business model.” Indeed, VSCO is a freemium-style community and app. It’s free to use, upload images, and even do basic edits with a few presets. But if you want access to more presets and loads of other really unique features, you can hop onto one of two monthly plans.
This is why everything they do on VSCO is very different from what you see out there. For example, VSCO has been doing algorithmic machine learning to make recommendations of people to photographers for them to follow. In fact, they’ve been doing that since 2018. But now, the world calls it machine learning and associates it with AI.
Our Net Promoter Scores for our members are in the 80s.
Eric Wittman, CEO of VSCO
However, the feed is still purely driven by manual curation of either the VSCO team or by the folks that a user chooses to follow. In fact, in a conversation with VSCO’s new VP of marketing, Eric attested to the fact that he got his feed to look a certain way by manually curating it over five years. “But if you don’t follow a ton of people already in VSCO’s feed, it can look a little stale, a little lonely,” he states. “And so that’s an area where we are looking at maybe improving our feed or having an alternative version of our feed.”
I didn’t press to see what the alternative version of the feed might look like. But I also understand that forming organic partnerships is a major part of being in the photo industry. After 15 years of running the Phoblographer, I also know that people tend to come and go like the people you knew in High School or College.
Most of VSCO’s users are free — and they have been for years and years. Those users see ads and their images are used for training their AI. “If we decide to use free user data on if we want to train a model, for example, then–for generative AI, then we’re just explicitly calling that out,” says Eric. “We look at people like Canva or Reddit who literally did the exact same thing.” In fact, VSCO made a specific page for this to provide extra clarity. In addition to weddings, most of the users on are portrait, astro, and landscape photographers.
Eric, many times throughout the conversation, mentions when VSCO went more consumer-based when the VSCO Girls era happened. He speaks about it as if the company collectively needs to go to therapy about it in order to move forward or just to live with it. These folks, who he calls “casual people” still come to VSCO and often apply thought processes that they did with Instagram to the community — not knowing that VSCO is instead striving for something more authentic. Those thought processes include things like hearting around five posts and stories, commenting on posts with four words in the form of just emojis, etc. But VSCO doesn’t really work like that. In fact, I’d argue that in order to make the most of it, you’d need to be a paid member.
I should probably explain the VSCO Girls meme a bit. I tried to find records of it and didn’t even realize that there’s a Wikipedia entry. It’s part of the Gen Z trend amongst women to be as individual as possible from one another — and yet they ironically all ended up looking the same. Vox and The Cut both reported on it. During this time, the platform was flooded with these users who went about posting images of their normal lives — very much unlike the serious photographers who are on the platform.
“I hope I never have to research this ever again,” I just said out loud in the edit of this article. I can’t even begin to imagine the collective cultural trauma the company went through. It started in 2019, went through the pandemic, and is now just a part of Gen Z fashion.
The Ethical Integration of AI
Where VSCO’s app has really fallen behind is with search. When you head into the app and try to find something that you’re looking for, the results can look almost as bad as those that eBay gives you these days.
“I’m not going to lie; it’s old school,” Eric says in agreement.
When a user uploads an image to VSCO, it goes through a series of algorithms to determine quality, what’s in the content uploaded, and then tag it. But that’s different from the search available in VSCO Hub — the brand’s way of helping clients find the photographers they want to license images from and work with. To do this, VSCO uses something called Clip Embeddings, which is a computer vision model that measures the similarity between text and images. This feature, Eric tells us, should be coming to core VSCO search in the future — and maybe even a “for you” style feed, too. I swore to be off of Instagram and other social media for four years. But being able to find that sort of stuff would be pretty revolutionary.
This is in addition to VSCO sites, which the company launched to help photographers make site building easier. And in the near future, something like a “contact me” form is supposed to be coming. That form might include questions about the budget, the type of gig, when the shoot is, etc.
Less than 50% of people who use VSCO Canvas are using generative AI.
Eric Wittman, CEO of VSCO
VSCO has one product that uses community images — it’s called VSCO Canvas. And specifically, that pulls from the large body of free images that it had on the platform for years. VSCO Canvas is designed more for ideation, and that clearly shows. It’s not designed to make images that are supposed to replace photographers. More importantly, it doesn’t even introduce AI into the workflow of a photographer’s images. Instead VSCO is using AI in a far different way.
“There are very few for-purpose built mood-boarding tools, and that’s exactly what the market needs right now,” states Eric about Canvas. “None of the things that we’re doing are designed to replace people. That’s not our intent.”
AI today has multiple uses. It can be a simple remove tool like VSCO has in their web studio product and one that can cause lots of frustration as it does in Adobe Lightroom. Then there are culling tools, like what wedding photographers use — which is assistive AI. Photographers these days have varying ethics — but they all just don’t want to be replaced. However, they’re using generative AI and assistive AI alike.
Philosophically speaking, Eric states that we’re still a very human-centered creative world. And according to him, users should specifically tag an image that they post that is primarily generated with AI. But as it is, there’s not a lot of it on VSCO because photographers are mostly posting images that they’ve made with a camera.]
In VSCO’s eyes, photographers have so much to deal with right now and are embracing AI to help with workflows or to give them exposure and visibility.
The Phoblographer, which is part of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative, looks to find ways to be super transparent about AI usage. And VSCO, by default, thinks that the authenticity needs to be embedded at the point of creation — similar to how Leica thinks about embedding Content Authenticity into the image itself with a special microchip inside the camera. Cameras like the Leica M11P have this.
“…if Apple embraces it with the iPhone, which is where 90% of the photos that are out there in the world that come from mobile devices, unless you address the majority of the problem, it has no teeth.” What’s even worse is that phones are constantly compositing images together. For those not aware, the cameras in smartphones are often doing tons of calculations to get the images to look a certain way. That means that it’s sharpening, adjusting highlights, tinkering with shadows, smoothing out skin, making something look more vivid, etc. Indeed, the processor is doing a lot more of the heavy lifting instead of the camera sensor itself.
And as technology becomes available, and as we’re able to partner with other bigger companies who can have more influence and can actually bring more to the table to affect the majority of things, we would totally sign up for that, but we’re not seeing that today.
Eric Wittman, CEO of VSCO
VSCO also has a tool called “For this Photo” that recommends edits when you want to apply a preset to it.
VSCO has a lot of work to do — but more importantly, I also think that photographers have tons of work to do. They’re all going to the same platforms and trying to do the same things over and over again. But I can tell you honestly that that doesn’t always work. In the photography world, a lot of the work you get can come from who you know more than what you know. Organic relationships will always be more important than how many followers you have. At a certain point, you also really need to ask yourself: do you want to be an influencer or a photographer? Because for sure, the two aren’t the same thing at all.
