He was born in 1982 in Budapest. He studied freehand drawing, desktop publishing, and photography, then obtained a Library and Information Science MA degree from Eötvös Loránd University. Between 2007 and 2011 he worked for the Origo news portal, first as a photo editor, then as the head of the photography column. After that, he was head of the photography editorial department of the MTI national news agency for three years.

Between 2014 and 2019 he taught documentary photography and photo editing at Budapest Metropolitan University. Since 2014, Virágvölgyi has worked as curator of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center. In 2023 he became artistic director and he is the secretary of the Capa Grand Prize Hungary. He edits the weekly blog Fortepan. Since 2016, he has been the cultural advisor of the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary. In 2018, he volunteered to edit the Fortepan digital photo archive. He has been a member of the board of trustees of the Pécsi József Photography Grant for young artists since 2021, and he has been a lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design since 2022.
He is married with two children, and lives and works in Budapest.