Apple / photo_and_video / VSCO: PHOTO EDITOR & PRESETS
REVIEW
VSCO still sells film, even after the meme moved on.
The preset library that defined a decade of phone photography is now a paid membership defending its turf against on-device AI.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
VSCO: Photo Editor & Presets
VISUAL SUPPLY COMPANY
OUR SCORE
7.4
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
VSCO has been the same app for long enough that it now sells nostalgia for itself. Open it in 2026 and the home tab still leads with film stock names — Kodak this, Fuji that — instead of the AI-generated thumbnails that have taken over the rest of the photo aisle. That’s either a confident bet on craft or a company that didn’t get the memo, and the answer depends on which screen you spend time on.
The presets earned the reputation. The “VSCO Girl” wave came and went, the original Spaces community quieted, and the staff cuts of 2024 thinned out the team that was supposed to defend the moat. What’s left is an editor with the best film emulations on iOS attached to a subscription that mostly justifies itself if you actually use them. VSCO’s whole pitch is that a photograph should look like it was taken on something, not generated by nothing.
VSCO's whole pitch is that a photograph should look like it was taken on something, not generated by nothing.
FEATURES
The core of VSCO is still its preset library — A6, C1, M5, the Kodak-leaning Agfa pack, the Fuji-leaning film series — applied with a single slider for strength. Free users get a small starter set; VSCO Membership unlocks the full catalogue plus Film X, the more expensive emulations that simulate grain structure, halation, and colour-shift behaviour from specific stocks.
Under the presets sits a real editor: exposure, contrast, white balance, HSL, split-tone, skin-tone slider, grain, fade, and a tone curve that finally got proper endpoints in the last redesign. Recipes save a stack of adjustments and reapply them across a shoot. Video gets the same preset engine, which is rarer than it sounds — most rivals stop at stills.
The capture side keeps DSCO-style live filters, RAW capture via the built-in camera, and the manual-control set (shutter, ISO, focus, white balance) most phone shooters never open. The social layer — Spaces, the feed, the Discover page — is still there, quieter than it used to be.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The presets remain the reason to pay. Film X stocks like Kodak Portra 400 and Fuji 400H render highlight roll-off and shadow tint in a way the iPhone's native editor and most one-tap rivals still flatten. The skin-tone slider is the best implementation of that idea on iOS — it isolates skin without the plastic mask Lightroom Mobile sometimes throws on.
Membership at around $29.99 a year is fair for what you get: full preset library, video edits, Montage for multi-layer composition, and a recipe system that means you can colour-grade a hundred photos from the same set in under a minute. For anyone who shoots film-adjacent and posts often, the math works.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The 2024 staff cuts left visible scars. The Spaces social layer feels under-tended, the Discover feed cycles the same accounts, and feature releases have slowed while competitors ship monthly. Lightroom Mobile now has presets, masking, and Adobe's denoise — and the Photos app is closing the gap on the basics with a free Photographic Styles system that ships on every iPhone.
The free tier has narrowed enough that it functions mostly as a demo, which is fine, but the upgrade prompt cadence is heavier than it used to be. And the AI question hangs over the whole app: VSCO has been cautious where Lightroom and Photoshop Express have gone all-in, which feels right philosophically and slow strategically.
CONCLUSION
If you came for the presets, they still deliver — and the Film X catalogue is genuinely hard to match outside of Lightroom plus a $200 preset pack. If you came for the community that made VSCO a verb in 2019, that part has moved on. Keep an eye on whether the company finds an answer to on-device generative editing before the rest of the category does it for them.