Earnings from Photography sales – September 2025

September normally is the start of the higher earning season, at least for me, and after a poor August, it did bounce back. Not as high as I would have liked, but I ended the month with earnings of $2860 of which my fine art sales contributed $882 this month. I’m certainly glad I made that evolution in my approach to photography back in 2020!

Here is my normal earnings graph:

And here is the split between stock and fine art that I normally publish. This graph is based on a slightly different calculation of earnings. The one above shows the actual money earned in the month and has peaks when Adobe has its free image buyout each year, for instance. For this next graph, I remove that one off payment and spread it out over 12 months, to smooth out the real monthly trend.

What is interesting (and a bit worrying) is that the stock income seems to be on the same sort of falling pattern that I saw in 2023. Each month is lower than the one before (with odd exceptions). I’m not sure that I can do anything to arrest that decline though. I am continuing to add new images (mainly travel and landscape) and I do notice that I’m getting some traction from Adobe on some of those, but it is rare for anything to become a “best seller”.

The fine art earnings are volatile as you might expect from larger one-off sales, but it is certainly better than I was seeing a couple of years ago.

The number of assets I needed to earn this income is obviously important. Here is my graph of photos and videos in the main agencies. I have about 500 videos in these totals.

Photo upload progress

I have significantly evolved from taking a mix of studio/concept images and travel shots into a focus almost entirely on travel related imagery. Partly from interest, as it is a bit boring taking studio shots to illustrate some concept, and partly because it became clear that AI generation of concept shots is far more powerful than travel imagery. We have all seen people posting some AI crap pretending to be a photo of a real place:

In comparison to the real bridge:

I’m sure it will get better, but there is always a tendency to recreate an image based on all the hundreds of thousands of images the AI system has been trained on, and I’m sure the internal instructions say that an exact copy of one of those images should not be provided for copyright reasons.

As a result, I take more and more images of real places. From my recent 8-day drive around Washington State last month, I ended up with 309 images that have been keyworded and uploaded to the stock agencies, for instance.

Here has been the growth in files at two different agencies over the past few years:

Deposit Photos takes almost all the images I upload. Adobe Stock only takes certain types of editorial shots and is also a bit variable in terms of which ones it rejects. Even so, it is well over 5000 new images over those years from 2020 to today.

Stock Agency Earnings Performance

No surprise that Adobe Stock is the leader in the earnings table in September with $971 that includes $88 as the Firefly bonus. Then way, way below we find Shutterstock with $270. Not as bad as many were predicting after a slow start to the month, but well below even recent months. iStock took a major fall as well, dropping to $239 after regularly being in the $300s for most of the year. It is the lack of a few higher priced sales that makes all the difference to the monthly total. Then we have Alamy at $187 and after that, the next highest is Canva at $92. Pond5 got the prize for consistency. $3.30 in August and $3.30 in September. Wonderful!

Best Earning Stock Assets

I always conclude this piece of the report with a summary of the images and videos that earned more than $10, as that makes a big difference to the final total. In August, this resulted in 13 downloads at more than $10 for $257 in total. September set an absolute new low under this measure. $82 from 5 downloads! No wonder the stock totals are not looking great!

The highest earner was one from Alamy – a simple studio shot that earned $26.40:

Then we had Shutterstock with this download of Shelby Street bridge in Nashville at sunrise for $18.44:

Dreamstime came up with one on the last day of the month for $13. I think these are a print license, and is a sunset scene taken over a local lake in Georgetown:

Incidentally, I earned $95 from video licenses on Adobe Stock in September, out of a total of $96! Most of the Adobe sales were around $8, the four on Shutterstock sold for $0.25 each!

Fine Art Sales and Activity in September 2025

Total fine art sales came in at $882 for the month. This was seriously helped by an approach by an interior decorator who wanted a digital copy of an older image from Newark for a client. She wanted to print this on acrylic at 72×36 inches (1.8m wide). I decided to charge $350 for the license. She had found my print on Fine Art America and contacted me via that site. These emails from FAA expressing interest in buying my artwork are often scams, but this clearly wasn’t! I also could have had another $100 for three licenses to print images in a small magazine but I screwed up and insulted the buyer when he asked for an image that was 10,000 pixels across. He stopped responding to me! Lesson learned!

I sold one print on Pictorem, two prints, a T-Shirt and a tapestry from FAA and two prints from Etsy in the month. I also restructured my Etsy store with a new cover image:

I also restructured the pricing a bit. I had some particularly high prices for 3 panel acrylic and metal prints and so I reduced those, but I also increased the price of smaller prints as I plan to run sales most of the time as I think that might increase the number of sales. I will write an article about Etsy pricing at some point this month in case anyone is interested in my thinking. I also need to add many more images to that store. The big sellers on Etsy seem to have 500 or so images, not the 32 I have!

I’ve also been trying to push my best images not only as articles on my own website, Backyard Image, but also as YouTube videos. I did one recently on the Washington State tour, narrated by my AI voice. I plan to do more of those going forward and perhaps start to monetize them on that site. Time will tell if that is successful!

That’s all for this month. I see that my friend Alex is not doing too well at stock and is taking up poker instead and another stock photographer is so disappointed that he is just going salmon fishing instead. At least I am keeping my head above water!