Is Stock Photography Dead in 2026? June Income Report

Just how much can you earn from photography these days? Sometimes when I look at the earnings from the smaller stock photo agencies I shudder to think just how far they have fallen, and yet, when I add up the totals, it still adds up to a meaningful amount. June is usually on the of the highlights of the year as Adobe Stock make their “free image” license purchases. Big error of judgement for me this time – I only proposed annual licenses instead of the alternative perpetual license and so only received $364 instead of the $1586 I received in 2025. However, I still managed to end the month with total income of $3691. How? My fine art print sales helped once again.

I also need to fill in the May results as I was traveling for quite a bit around the end of May – total that month was $2901.

Growth in earnings from online sales of photography

Here is my normal graph showing earnings over the past five years from the online (and sometimes offline) sales of my photography.

You can see the shortfall in the monthly total compared to previous years. I can perhaps think that at least I still have the same images to offer to Adobe Stock next year. But will I change my approach and offer them as perpetual licenses – I am not sure!

How many photos and videos in the main stock agencies?

Instead of my normal graph showing the portfolio size in the main agencies, here is a growth of assets graph instead. You can see that I have continued to add images and some videos month by month and my largest portfolio is now at 23600 assets. My travels this past month took me to Germany and the UK and I came back with over 2000 images again. I currently have processed and selected about 500 of them for the stock agencies. I’m not sure yet how many will go to my various print on demand sites. I tend to sell more prints in the USA and I’m unsure which UK/Germany ones might be attractive to that audience, but time will tell.

Best earning stock photo agencies breakdown chart June 2026

Here is my chart of the earnings from the main stock agencies and from my fine art sales in June 2026. As expected, Adobe Stock is well in the lead with the extra payment for the free image collection.

What is so disappointing here is how Shutterstock has fallen to new lows – $228 in June after $402 in May. It is the same old story – these days the earnings from Shutterstock depend almost entirely on the number of higher priced sales, which we have no control over and seem to arrive at random. In May I had one license for $120 and a total of $231 in sales over $10 from Shutterstock. In June, nothing sold for more than $12 and the equivalent total was $34.

The Pivot: Stock Photo Income vs. Fine Art Print Growth

For this next graph, I do something a little different with the totals. I remove the one-off income such as the Adobe free image collection and spread that payment over twelve months instead. Smoothing out those sudden peaks, in effect. So this graph shows the comparison between stock agency income compared to my various “fine art” efforts which I categorize as individual sales or licenses for print work.

As you can see, there is a general drop in the income from the stock agencies (even though I continue to add assets) and a gradual, but lumpy, growth in the fine art related income.

Streamlining the Workflow: Testing ArtushVision’s New Local AI Engine

That is all for now – I have many images to keyword from my recent trip. I still am a big believer in the ArtushVision AI system for managing my metadata between Lightroom and the stock agencies and have used that to get 250 of my new images online pretty smoothly. I’ve written a few times about AI driven keywording, the most recent article being here. If you want to try it out, I have an affiliate link to the ArtushVision AI site. I’m currently testing a newer version that can use a locally running AI model, has a managed FTP upload system and also manages the creation of the controlled vocabulary keywords that are necessary for Getty/iStock. I’ve used Stock Submitter and Microstock Plus for many years, but they are really struggling to get through the various blocks that the stock agencies are setting up to avoid AI models scraping their content and so an alternative would be great. I’ll write more about that in the coming weeks.

More adventures with AI

Finally, if you are wondering where the somewhat strange, featured image for the post on my home page came from – the answer is, of course, AI. I’ve not gone into the creation of AI images for the stock agencies, but I did make use of Gemini’s new agent App, Opal. I copied in the text from a few of my articles from Backyard Image, my website for people interested in my photography to “train” the agent and then uploaded a screenshot of the images that I wanted to use for an article. I gave it a brief outline of what I had in mind, and I quickly had a draft for a new article about the Wiltshire village of Castle Combe. It did need editing and I have tried to update the agent about how it will write the next one, but it certainly made the article easier to put together, and it wrote it in my style. The times they are a changing!