500px

Platform · this deep dive is built from the official pages of the platform itself and of the tools that support it.

Overview

500px is a community of photographers with portfolios and a feed, on top of which photo licensing runs. The agreement describes the service as a platform for registered users where you can upload and display photographs, keep galleries, take part in contests, take out paid accounts and license images through distributors.

For a photographer this is two separate stories. The first is the showcase: people look at your work, your profile grows. The second is stock: you mark an image "for licensing", and from then on it is not the site that disposes of it but its distributors. The agreement warns you right away: the site should not be used to store your work, keep your own copies. The legal entity is "500px, Inc.", the governing law is that of Ontario and Canada, with arbitration in New York, San Francisco or Toronto.

Who's here

The agreement sets age boundaries, not audience size: the service is available to people aged 18 and over for paid accounts and licensing, and from 14 with the permission of a parent or guardian. The same document warns that the site contains work featuring nudity and violence.

The geography of sales is known from the platform's blog: Getty Images and Visual China Group are named as distributors, and VCG "acquired 500px in February" and sells images in China (a 2018 post).

Getting started

Registration is ordinary, with one caveat: the email address you give may be used to transfer licensing royalties to you. The service may be used by owners of visual content and the organizations representing them — galleries, agents, distributors; if you own the work but are not its author, you may not upload it for self-promotion.

A paid account is taken out separately; the agreement does not list what it includes and refers you to the settings instead. Refunds are strict: after the trial period there are no refunds, there are no refunds for monthly subscriptions, and access is kept for 30 days after the last payment.

What you can publish

Photographs only: the platform does not accept video, illustration or graphic design.

Volumes are set by a "fair storage policy". A free account gets no more than 21 new photographs per week and 2000 in total (roughly 60 GB). A paid one is formally unlimited, but "within reason", and reasonable means no more than 1000 new photographs per week and 100 000 in total (roughly 3000 GB).

Forbidden: defamation, pornography, other people's protected work, harvesting other people's data, advertising to other users. Listed separately are artificially changing the number of votes and comments, including for money, and multiple accounts used for voting, as well as robots, spiders and scrapers without written permission (RSS being the exception).

Rights to what you upload: what you give away

Ownership stays with you: the rights to the visual content remain with you or with the owner you represent. But a license is granted immediately: "By uploading Visual Content to the Site, you grant 500px a non-exclusive or exclusive, transferable, fully paid-up, worldwide license to use, sublicense, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Visual Content in connection with the Services".

Then come the clauses that are rarely examined:

• Waiver of moral rights. You waive your moral rights to the extent the law allows, and where a waiver is not possible you undertake not to assert them against 500px, its distributors and its clients.
• You do not set the price. 500px and its distributors get full and sole discretion over licensing terms and pricing, without your approval or consultation.
• Metadata gets rewritten. The platform is entitled to change titles, descriptions, tags and metadata.
• Derivative works belong to it. 500px owns the rights to derivative works created by it or for it, if the work contains more than one image.
• You cannot take permission back. You expressly and irrevocably assign away the rights to terminate the permissions granted and to seek an injunction.
• Removal takes months. A request to pull an image from licensing is carried out within 180 days, and for a further 90 days after removal the work may still be used in marketing.

Under an exclusive assignment you may not license the image or similar images to anyone else, and may use them yourself only for personal, non-commercial purposes and are obliged to redirect enquiries to 500px. Releases are required: a model release for recognizable people and a property release for recognizable property.

How to grow

500px does not publicly describe how ranking works — the pages we checked say nothing about it. The only mention of promotion in the agreement works in the opposite direction: 500px and its distributors are entitled to use your name and your work to advertise themselves without additional consent or compensation.

There is an educational stream: the blog iso.500px.com runs sections on the photography business and licensing and opens without signing in. On the date of our check, the robots.txt file closed off only the /g/ section from Googlebot.

Path to monetization

Royalty shares are named in the agreement directly, per month, as a share of "net licensing fees":

• exclusive assignment, Pro or Awesome account — 100 %;
• exclusive assignment, free account — 60 %;
• non-exclusive assignment, any account — 25 %.

Payouts are in US dollars only. The threshold is a minimum balance of 30 dollars, after which the platform promises to pay no later than 15 business days after the end of the reporting month, either through an online payment service or by cheque. Taxes are on the photographer: a "U.S. person" files a W-9 form, a "foreign" one files a W-8.

The risk of inactivity: if the platform cannot reach you or transfer the money for 12 months, it is entitled to close the registration and delete the images. When it moved to distribution through Getty Images and VCG, the platform said that the terms of the agreement and the royalty rate were not changing.

Tools and automation

There is no public programming interface. During our check the developers.500px.com subdomain did not respond at all — the Historical documentation sits on GitHub in the legacy-api-documentation repository, next to an iOS wrapper marked DEPRECATED. The README gives no reasons for closing access and no date.

The agreement, meanwhile, forbids automated access by robots and scrapers without written permission. The practical conclusion: there are no official automation tools, and unofficial ones are directly forbidden by the contract.

Limits and rules

• Photographs only — video, illustration and graphics are not accepted.
• Uploads — 21 images per week and 2000 in total on the free plan; 1000 per week and 100 000 in total is the "reasonable limit" of a paid account.
• Age — 18 for licensing, 14 with a parent's permission.
• Payout threshold — 30 US dollars.
• Removal from licensing — up to 180 days plus 90 days for marketing.
• Law — Ontario and Canada; the edition we checked is marked "Last updated: December 2, 2019".
• The service may disappear — the platform is entitled to suspend the site and delete any content without notice.

Who it's for

It suits a photographer who needs a showcase in a professional community and is ready to hand the commercial fate of an image to a distributor. The rate of 100 % of net fees for an exclusive assignment with a paid account is more generous than standard stock terms — but in exchange, neither the image nor anything resembling it can be sold anywhere else.

It is not for videographers, illustrators or designers: their work is simply not accepted. It is not for anyone building an automated process: there is no API and scrapers are forbidden. It is not for use as the only storage for your portfolio — the agreement itself warns against that. And it is not for you if it matters that you set the price yourself or can pull work from sale quickly.

Verified data

The checked data this deep dive rests on.

Languages

the interface language of the home page: en

The language is taken from the markup attribute, the versions from hreflang

source, checked 2026-07-28

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