Earnings from online sales and licensing of photography in April 2026

Each month I report my earnings from online sales and licensing of my digital photos and videos and have been doing so for over 16 years now! A long time in this challenging industry, but a rewarding one. I just noticed that my total earnings since I started in 2008 are now $492,443. I guess a party is in order when I reach $500,000 which is probably going to be in August this year.

Getting me closer to that target were some pretty good results in April 2026 with total income of $3070. This is the highest April total since 2022 where I earned $3457 driven significantly by my new interest in selling my best work as prints.

History of Earnings from online photography

And, of course, the assets that drove these earnings:

Earnings from the main stock agencies

I added yet more functionality to my massive spreadsheet a month or two back to show the earnings from the main agencies (and my print work). I need to be careful these days – I added all the agency earnings last night and had the total completed this morning. But an hour or two later, all that data had vanished. Not sure exactly why, but luckily I had a backup running every night and was able to get back my previous version. Thank goodness for a backup plan for all my photos and important files!

And so here is the chart of earnings from the main stock agencies in April 2026:

Adobe, of course, is the agency to beat these days and delivered the best performance for the past twelve months (except for that great month in January this year where we seem to get higher prices per download than the rest of the year. I don’t recall why that is – if anyone can fill me in on the reason for higher individual download earnings at the start of the year, I would be grateful. Shutterstock strangely showed a big increase over the early part of the year. I’m now at Level 4 but I got there in mid-February. I’m a long way from Level 5. Speaking of which, my download totals this year have been very strange.

The last five months have all been between 340 and 346. My AI friend tells me the chance of that occurring statistically (having looked at downloads since 2021) is 0.001%. Odd! The old timers among you will recall discussions about a cap on earnings that supposedly was in place sometime in the past 10 years!

Interesting higher priced downloads from Stock Agencies

Shutterstock took the record for the highest priced individual download in April with this drone image of the waves crashing onto the coastline of Kauai:

Then Shutterstock was next with this image, again from Kauai, for $36

Alamy was third with an opioid shot for $30 and then Shutterstock filled the next three places, the first and second of those being images of the Taro fields near Hanalei on Kauai which sold for $29.07, each.

All told, my over $10 images in April added up to $282 for 11 downloads. Pretty nice.

Video Sales in April 2026

I tend to ignore video sales a little, but I have been noticing increasing numbers from Adobe in particular. My total video sales this month were $146 compared with $189 last month, although March included Getty/iStock video sales that added about $30 to that total. This clip sold 5 times on Adobe for a total of $41.

Fine Art Sales in April 2026

As you saw in the agency results, my total Fine Art Sales reached $909 in April, thanks to a rush of orders from my Etsy site. I sold seven prints in the month. Four were paper prints (8×10 up to 16×20 inches) that I printed at home and shipped, and three were canvas prints, in sizes up to 30×40 inches. Total profit after all the fees, production and shipping costs was $442. I’m pleased to see my aerial sunset over Austin, Texas, starting to sell.

I posted this image on the Austin subreddit earlier in the month (after the sale) and was pleased to see over 1600 upvotes and about 60 comments from locals, most admiring the image. I hope that will result in some more prints going forward. I did write about the changing nature of the Austin Skyline on my Fine Art site, Backyard Image, and that article gets quite a few visitors which I am sure is helping with sales.

New Ventures for print sales

I’m trying to break into the B2B market for providing prints to new healthcare facilities and corporate offices by forming relationships with Art consultants. Not necessarily easy, but I’ll give it a go. To do that, I needed to build a site which displays my best print-ready images in a way that the consultant can sift and search for ones that meet the requirements from their client. I couldn’t just send them to my Fine Art America or Pictorem Print on Demand sites. I built a site using WordPress which I am trying with a consultant I have been referred to, and which isn’t public.

I did write about my difficult and troublesome efforts of building this site with the help of Google Gemini which was hallucinating strongly! And I wrote about the more successful efforts of using my new favorite keywording and metadata app, ArtushVision AI, to develop and add new keywords, titles and descriptions to my exported JPEGs to allow the consultant system to display clinical healing images, for instance, if that was their requirement.

Busy times, and I hope successful times ahead!