2025 Annual Analysis of Stock Photo earnings
2025 ended with quite a splash of earnings, particularly due to the sale of my Fine Art Photography prints, and the total for the month of December was $3717, of which $1884 came from prints and $1994 from stock photos and videos.
Here is my usual chart of total earnings in each month for the past few years.
This was my third best month of 2025, beaten by the Adobe earnings from free image buyouts in June and the fantastic sale of multiple prints in September. Again, as usual, here is a graph showing the growth in the number of stock assets that generate this income. This one is the historical growth graph to show how the number of assets continues to grow over the years.
December 2025 Earnings Results
Earnings from the main stock agencies were down across the board in December and companies tend to shut down over the last weeks of the month. Even iStock, which reports November earnings in December was not great – $331 compared to a great $620 the previous month.
Here is a table of the earnings from those stock agencies in December:
And the same thing displayed as a pie chart.
Larger priced sales in December 2025
As usual, I track the sales that earned more than $10 in the month as a larger number of these sales is a great sign of a good month. And there were 11 sales for a total of $250 in the month. This compares with $560 in earnings from >$10 sales in November.
As usual, Shutterstock has the larger priced sales. Adobe is reliable but rarely comes up with a really high-priced sale.
This one sold for $50 on Shutterstock – dawn over Washington DC.
Shutterstock was next with a $38 sale of the construction of the semiconductor fab plant that Samsung is building near Austin:
I took this back in late 2024 and I visited again with my drone on New Years Eve to take more photos of progress, plus some of a large data center under construction as well.
This next one is also Shutterstock for $30. An unusual one as it is much more of print, I think (and perhaps it was bought for that?). It is an intentional camera movement shot of a pan across the waves of Hanalei Bay on Kauai at sunrise. Never sold before on any stock site!
In fact, Shutterstock made up $185 of the $250 in higher priced sales in December. I hope that continues into 2026!
Monthly variability in stock photo earnings
I did create this next chart to see if there was any variability in the earnings in each month of the year. It groups stock income by month over the past five years. What we can see is that December is rarely good (and the last two years have been worse than most). January and February are not that good. But overall, it is hard to determine much else from the chart!
The numbers in this graph have the larger one-off payments removed (such as the Adobe free image buyout and larger AI payouts) and those are smoothed over the following 12 months. So, this gives a better idea of the trends that I am seeing month by month. As you can see, pretty much each collection of monthly totals shows a downward trend (except January for some reason) which mirrors what I think many of us are seeing – a steady decline in income from stock photography. This is shown more clearly in this graph that shows how my stock income has changed and how fine art prints is at least replacing some of that:
Annual Results of Earnings from Photography
This chart shows more of the pattern as it simply shows the income in each year. It still uses the smoothed earnings pattern by spreading out larger payments received in a particular month.
This shows just how long I have been at this game! All the years through to 2020 show that the more files you add, the more your income grows. I had some good results in the Covid year of 2020 with some early uploads of covid related imagery as I think the drop off in this steady earnings growth was already happening in 2019. Since then, pretty much each year has been worse than the one before. As you saw in an earlier graph, I continue to add files to the main agencies and still my income from stock photography drops.
The decision to plow more effort into fine art prints is paying off though as that part of the chart is much more positive. Growth, year by year!
I do a lot of correction in my spreadsheet to smooth out the free image buyouts and the AI training payments and sometimes I get confused with what I am seeing. In fact, I found an error in the spreadsheet when looking at the chart above. I corrected it and as far as I can see, the chart is accurate. However, the final one simply plots the total received in each month so it should be accurate. At last, some good news! Yes, things are not growing, but at least they are not falling either and 2025 was my best year in terms of earnings with a final total of $39584, which is the highest year since I started.
This is going to be a hard act to follow in 2026, although I plan to get out and about with my drone a lot more in 2026 and take more videos with it. Perhaps that will be the secret to success in 2026.
