500px is a place to showcase and license your photography. Obsydian is the protected page you link out from.
500px is a photography community and stock-licensing marketplace: a curated feed for discovery, a directory profile, an optional portfolio-site add-on, and a licensing program that pays photographers a cut when their images are licensed through the platform. The free tier is limited (around 7 uploads/week, with ads); Pro runs about $12.99/month or roughly $59.94/year and adds priority placement, the portfolio site, and removes upload limits.
We're biased — but honest.
500px is built around discovery and licensing revenue for photography — a genuinely different job to a link-in-bio page. It has no automatic watermarking beyond what a photographer manually overlays, no metadata scrubbing, and no concept of a single link-out hub for a creator's other platforms. Obsydian isn't trying to be a stock marketplace; it's the fast, protected front door 500px doesn't offer, with watermarking and EXIF/GPS scrubbing on by default and a genuinely free tier.
| Feature | Obsydian | 500px |
|---|---|---|
| Visible watermarking | Text, tile, edge-frame & motion | — |
| Invisible (steganographic) watermark | Yes — LSB stego | — |
| Automatic EXIF / GPS removal | Always on | — |
| Link-in-bio page included | Yes — full profile | — |
| Creator-friendly content policies | Yes — won't deplatform your niche | Photographers building a licensing/stock income stream |
| Pricing | Free · £9 · £19 | Free (~7 uploads/wk) · ~$12.99/mo Pro |
Comparison reflects each provider's publicly listed plans and features as of June 2026. Details change — check each provider for the latest.
Comparison reflects each provider's publicly listed plans and features as of June 2026. Details change — check each provider for the latest.
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