Earnings from Photography in February and March 2025

Laziness strikes again and I failed to publish my February earnings. They weren’t great and so that dampened my enthusiasm a little! Plus, I had been in Kauai taking even more photos and videos for my portfolio of Hawaiian imagery at the various stock agencies and print on demand sites, which kept me busy. The thumbnail for this month’s report is an AI generated scene from Hawaii!

But here we are with a two-month report of sales and earnings from photography in February and March 2025.

Earnings in February 2025

February is a short month, but somehow the earnings of $2487 didn’t impress me too much. The whole month felt pretty flat as I was tracking the sales each day. The split was $2010 for stock and $476 for print sales.

The usual graphs are below after the March 2025 earnings summary.

The individual agencies were not particularly great in February. Adobe as usual was the leader but with just $662 after earnings of $883 in January. However, this was a much better result than I had seen in December with the $558 total. iStock was very good with $480 and then SS came in with a reasonable (for these days) $346. Alamy next with $204 and then we are quickly in the weeds. Canva continues it slow decline with $116. Last February it was $179. They are obviously migrating their users towards imagery that is either AI created or doesn’t require a payment to contributors. Not much that we can do there to impact the monthly results.

High earners in February 2025

I always say that the number of higher priced sales can either make or break a month, and February was actually not too bad in terms of larger sales. I had 10 download that resulted in income of $267. One of the best was this pretty unusual shot of a pathogen that causes cedar-apple rust. I had several of these growing in my conifer trees back in Virginia and I recall taking off a branch with the fungus on it and taking it indoors to shoot with flash against a white background. I then replaced the white with an image of the trees themselves slightly out of focus which all contributes to a bright and clear image that would be difficult to achieve outdoors. So, I’m glad that someone went to Alamy and I received $63 from the sale:

And then Shutterstock came up with a $63 sale as well – a different version of my famous cat:

This particular one has earned $1200 since I uploaded back in 2011.

Shutterstock also gave me $30 for this shot of an old-fashioned Union Jack flag at Jamestown. Just a grab shot walking around the fort there, and just goes to show how the simplest of shots can make money.

Alamy actually had four of these over $10 images this month for a total of $114. Sometimes it is a great agency!

Earnings from photography in March 2025

March just seemed like a different month right from the first week, and actually ended with total earnings of $3098 which is higher than I achieved in the past 3 years. Here is my normal historical graph so you can see the trends:

And my normal files per agency chart:

I’ve added almost 650 images this quarter to the various stock agencies, mainly from the trip down the Nile and also the vacation in Kauai. I’m only about halfway through my Egypt files, as it is taking quite a bit of time to keyword and describe them. I must say, however, how useful and accurate I am finding the AI-driven keywording sites. I wrote about my tests of AI keywording with a couple of sites here, although PhototagAI, which is integrated into Lightroom is my favorite.

I’m also coming up against a Lightroom Error 1555 which occurs quite frequently when I am keywording and copying metadata between images. I’ll write about this Error 1555 separately in case anyone else is coming up against this error.

Agency performance in March 2025

No prizes for guessing the best performing agency in March. Adobe Stock came in top with $897 this month which is my best ever month in regular sales on Adobe. iStock beat SS once again, with $386 compared to $368 although that latter number is quite good for SS these days, sad to say. Alamy was next with $161 which is certainly not a good result for them. Canva continues its decline with $105, the lowest for many years.

High earners in March 2025

Alamy was the one to beat in February and then came in with just one sale over $10 in March with this pretty boring shot of some football goal posts against the sunset. Once again, nothing special, but it earned $15. And that was it for Alamy!

The star of the show in March was Pond5 that came from nowhere to sell a video for $44. This is the site that earned a total of $2.10 in February. The video had been taken off the side of a cruise ship in bad weather:

Shutterstock got the prize for the highest priced still image with a shot that I just saw as I was driving back from a bike ride in West Virginia. I saw this church in the distance, drove on a while and then decided to turn round and take a photograph of it. The image sold for $45. Definitely a good use of my time and the bit of gas to retrace my steps!

I had two sales for $13 each on Dreamstime. Nice, but annoying because I am reasonably sure that these are bought under their print license and so it could well be that someone is licensing it to print for themselves or maybe to offer as a print somewhere. And of course, I offer my own prints of this piece in my new Etsy store:

I guess it is just one more of the challenges of selling licenses for images and trying to offer the same ones at print on demand sites as well.

But perhaps the biggest surprise of the month was a sale on BigStockPhoto. Any sale would be newsworthy, but this one was for $25!

All told I had 14 downloads for more than $10 in March for a total of $304, including a $15 sale on EyeEM which was quite a surprise.

A couple of things I learned in the month

Even after all these years, I do learn new things! I noticed in one of the emails sent by the iStock/Getty team that they referred to the “batch” that you need to specify before uploading to the site. I’ve always just made up something when I have been preparing the images for upload, but often that made-up word is not particularly unique. For instance, I’ve been working on processing and keywording images from my Egypt trip for three months now and I always use the batch “Egypt” for those. The email mentioned that the iStock Inspectors automatically move a batch to the back of the queue when new files are submitted with that same batch name. So, if I have some “Egypt” images waiting in the queue for review and I upload another 20 images to the same batch, the whole batch moves to the back of the queue. Message – use a different batch name for each upload to avoid this longer wait than necessary for review.

The second one came from a question from a reader as to why there are no direct (in-agency) sales reported by Zoonar. This is a relatively small agency that I have been with for years and it comes up with sales each month, but only from the partner agency it feeds the images to. In the early years, I chose all partners (including Alamy) because it was understood that different contributors to Alamy had a different ranking in the search results, and so a combined portfolio from Zoonar might rank better than I would do on my own. Also, Alamy in those days was quite difficult to submit to. The downside is that you lose part of the commission payment when that image sells. I removed Alamy as a partner for new images a few years ago as I submit directly now, but I still use Zoonar to get to agencies like AGE, DDPImages, Picture Alliance and so on. I asked the MD of Zoonar there for his comments on the lack of direct sales and he let me know that they are working hard to perfect the translation of keywords and descriptions into German (current AI systems don’t do a great job) and that they have found that newly translated files sell much better. He mentioned some contracts they now had with German TV stations, that a complete revamp of their website was underway, and that I could expect to see some direct sales from Zoonar pretty soon. I still submit to them (all non-editorial images go there) and so will continue to do so. I do have almost 17,000 images there and normally see $30-$50 in earnings each month. March 2025 was $71. So, for me, a nice little income stream for zero effort. If you are interested in joining Zoonar, I have an affiliate link here.

Fine Art Sales

Fine Art’s contribution to the total earnings continues to be pretty up and down. February was $662 and then March bounced back with $1104. That latter month had one pretty massive sale of a 52×70 inch framed print for which I earned $486. The subject was not one that makes me feel great as an artist though:

I guess I should be proud of my restoration skills using Photoshop as I removed various folds and marks in the original print (from the Library of Congress) and generally made it look more like I think the original would have appeared. Still, a very nice sale that made a big difference to the month’s earnings.

I’ve continued to add new images to my Etsy store, and had a lot of success in getting views, likes and comments about this digital watercolor of an old church in Hanalei, Kauai.

The approach I am following is trying to get as many views as I can, in the hope (and perhaps expectation) that someone will ask if any prints are available. On this occasion, I got exactly that, from a real person, but any attempt of mine to make contact either directly on her profile or via the comments on the original post came to nothing. Very strange, and a bit disappointing. But that is life!

My ongoing goal is to add more images and continue with Etsy advertising and posts on Facebook groups, but it all takes time. I ended up with a monthly loss on my store – one small sale but more advertising costs than the income!

I hope your month was reasonable. It is a hard industry sometimes with occasional successes!