How-to · Creator profile
Your public creator profile is the link-in-bio storefront where every photo set you publish gets listed: studio.apiway.ai/<your-username>. This guide walks through every field — avatar, display name, username (the URL slug), bio, Instagram, TikTok — explains what happens when the profile isn't published vs published, what unpublishing actually does to your existing listings, and how to change the URL after the fact without losing earnings or backlinks.
Last reviewed: .
From the sidebar, open Creators. The Profile tab is the default view. The form has two cards: Public profile (avatar, name, username, bio, Instagram, TikTok) and Your marketplace listings (storefront preview where you reorder published photo sets). Everything in this guide lives in the top card.
Click Change photo, pick an image from disk (PNG, JPEG, WebP, or HEIC are all accepted). Apiway opens a crop modal so you can position and zoom the avatar inside a square frame — the public profile renders avatars as a circle so the corners get clipped automatically. Confirm the crop and the upload runs in the background. The placeholder "No photo" disappears once it lands.
The Name field is what renders as the H1 title on your public storefront — up to 80 characters. If you don't have a brand name yet, the Surprise me button generates a random one and you can keep tapping until something fits. The display name does NOT have to match your username; it's the human-readable headline, the username is the URL slug.
The Username field becomes the slug in your public URL: studio.apiway.ai/<username>. Rules enforced by the input: 3–30 characters, lowercase letters / digits / underscore only — uppercase auto-converts to lowercase, special characters get stripped as you type. A leading '@' is also stripped automatically. Reserved words can't be used (admin, api, app, auth, cabinet, contact, creators, explore, gallery, login, public, www and a few more); the API rejects them on save.
Up to 2000 characters. Two sentences is enough — what kind of fashion shoots you ship (urban streetwear, soft-light editorial, plus-size lifestyle, etc.) and the tone buyers should expect. The bio renders on your public profile right under the avatar and feeds the SEO description tag, so make it specific and concrete; vague bios under-perform on search.
Both fields accept either a handle (with or without @) or a full profile URL — up to 120 characters each. They render as social buttons on your public profile. Adding them is one of the highest-ROI trust signals you can post: buyers picking creators for paid advertising look at the off-Apiway footprint before they pick. Anonymous profiles earn at a discount because brands won't risk paid-ad compliance on them.
Until you click Publish, the profile is private — you can't be found in Explore, your photo sets can't be marketed, and the marketplace publish flow blocks every Sell-a-photo-set attempt with a 'profile not published' error. Once you publish, the page goes live at studio.apiway.ai/<username>, your already-uploaded photo sets switch to active on the storefront, and you appear in Explore search. The button text flips to Unpublish profile so you can flip it back if needed.
The View profile button (top-right of the Public profile card) opens your public storefront in a new tab. Eyeball it: avatar circle, display name, bio, social buttons, listings grid. If something looks off (wrong avatar crop, typo in bio), come back to the Profile tab and edit — every field saves automatically 700ms after you stop typing, plus a final flush if you close the tab mid-edit.
Below the profile card, the Your marketplace listings section is the storefront preview. Drag the grip handle on any unpinned card to reorder — the new order saves in the background. Pin a card to lock it to the top of the public storefront (good for showcasing your strongest set or a current promotion); unpinning drops it back into the drag-reorder pool.
An unpublished profile means your page at studio.apiway.ai/<username> doesn't render publicly, you don't appear in Explore search, and the marketplace publish flow blocks every Sell-a-photo-set attempt with a profile-not-published error. You can still upload and stage photo sets as drafts, but nothing is live until the profile flips to published. Practical effect: zero pickups, zero earnings, zero discoverability until you click Publish.
3 to 30 characters, lowercase letters (a–z), digits (0–9), and underscore only — pattern /^[a-z0-9_]{3,30}$/. The input strips uppercase and special characters as you type, and a leading '@' is removed automatically. Reserved words can't be used: admin, api, app, auth, cabinet, contact, creators, explore, g, gallery, login, new_password, public, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, www. The API rejects reserved values on save with an error.
Yes — change it in the Username field anytime; the change saves automatically. Important caveat: the URL changes immediately, so any external links pointing to the old URL (Instagram bio, portfolio sites, blog posts citing your storefront, screenshots) will 404. Listing-level URLs also rebuild around the new username. If you have meaningful off-Apiway link equity on the old username, treat the rename as a real migration: pick the new name, then update every external link the same day.
Display name is the H1 title on your public profile (up to 80 characters, any characters allowed, can include spaces, capitals, emojis if you want). Username is the URL slug (lowercase letters / digits / underscore, 3–30 chars). They're independent — your display name can be 'Sofia Reyes Studio' while your username is 'sofiareyes'. Buyers see the display name; the URL bar shows the username.
Click Change photo on the Profile tab, pick a new image, re-crop in the modal, confirm. The new avatar replaces the old one within a couple of seconds and propagates to your public profile and every storefront listing card. Any image format the platform supports works (PNG, JPEG, WebP, HEIC). There's no separate 'banner' or 'cover' photo — the avatar is the single profile image.
No. Unpublishing removes the public page and takes all your marketplace photo sets off sale, but nothing is deleted. Earnings history is preserved, your photo sets stay in your account in their existing state, and re-publishing the profile puts everything back on sale immediately at the same URLs. The standard pattern: unpublish during an extended break or while you're refreshing your portfolio, re-publish when you're ready to take pickups again.
Profile field edits autosave 700ms after you stop typing (you'll see a brief 'Saving…' / 'Saved' indicator near the Save button). There's also a Save button for explicit confirmation, and a tab-close safety net using fetch keepalive so the last keystrokes don't get lost if you close the tab mid-edit. The Publish / Unpublish toggle is its own action — those are explicit clicks, not autosave.
Yes — the bio feeds the meta description on your public profile page (studio.apiway.ai/<username>). Search engines and AI answer engines use the description to summarize what your storefront is about. Concrete bios ('Soft-daylight urban streetwear; commercial license cleared') outperform vague ones ('Photographer & model'). The bio also gets indexed for the on-Apiway Explore search, so naming your shoot style explicitly there directly affects discovery.
