Making money as a photographer in July 2025

A full month goes by with no travel for me. So, nothing but hard work processing, keywording and uploading images from previous trips earlier in the year. I do enjoy (sort of) the processing, but I need to take regular breaks from keywording as that does get a little like hard work. I continue to use AI assistance in keywording, but I only ask for 30 keywords and don’t always use all of those. I then add to the AI generated ones to make the image more “complete” in terms of the keywords used. As a result of this, I have increased my files on the main agencies by about 285 files in July. I don’t expect that images of Greenland will be big sellers, but they may be interesting to Adobe for the Free Image collection next year!

July 2025 Earnings

July is often a slow month for sales with earnings of just $2342 in 2024 – the lowest of the year. But this July, I shot back to the highest set of earnings in 2025 (ignoring the extra coming from the Adobe free collection) of $3438. Quite a change to report good news! Here is my normal graph of the earnings trend for the past 5 years:

And my chart of assets in the main stock photo agencies:

Stock Photo Earnings compared to Fine Art

Both my main categories of earnings from photography were great this month. Stock photo earnings came in with $2506 and Fine Art earnings were just short of $1000 with $931 this month. More on that later in this report. Here is the historical graph plotting the two main streams of income:

This chart is different to the main earnings one in that I spread out the one-off earnings from AI payouts from the stock agencies and the Adobe free collection payout over 12 months rather than just recording them in the month they occurred. As I mentioned last month, the long decline in stock earnings from early 2023 through mid 2024 seems to have recovered somewhat. Fingers crossed that will continue!

Stock Photo Agency performance

What made this a great month for stock earnings was somewhat unusual, I must admit. Was it a great month with SS? Fat chance! That agency hit new lows with just $228 in July, moving down into 5th place. How the mighty are fallen! As usual, Adobe Stock led the pack with a reasonable $768. Alamy did really well this month with total earnings of $462. But in number 3 position, coming from behind, was Dreamstime! I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Dreamstime ended the month with $401.05 after a run of 29 separate sales of their enhanced license of $13 – all of scenes from Kauai in Hawaii. I always thought these were for print licenses, but I must admit I’m not sure. Here are the scenes they sold:

Then we have iStock at $362 and then rapidly fall below $100 for the remaining stock agencies.

High earners in July 2025

I always say the difference between an average and a good month is the number of “lucky” high earners you get in the month. As you can imagine, Dreamstime made a big difference to my normal analysis of sales over $10 in July. There were 40 downloads for $792 this month. But the real high earners came this month from Alamy with the highest being this image taken on one early morning walk in Nashville, Tennessee, which sold for $186. Exactly the sort of image that AI will have trouble reproducing for quite some time.

Then from Alamy again, a photo taken on a cruise into the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro which earned $58, and finally another Alamy sale of $40 for a drone shot over the town of Stowe in Vermont with fall colors.

My only other sale over $20 was a video on Pond5 – yes, someone woke up that agency! I got $35 for a drone video along the coastline of Kauai.

But the stars were really all those Dreamstime licenses. Someone must love Kauai!

Fine Art Activity

My two Print on Demand sites were pretty quiet in July. I got one email from Fine Art America announcing a sale, but of course, it was just a mug with a $3 commission! Pictorem was nothing. The big earners were actually a small company that leases wall art to companies that had invited me to submit some work a couple of years ago and they sold 6 framed prints to a company that earned me $487. And, a different company that similarly saw my work earned another $200 or so in July from selling my prints. I do find that increasingly people are finding my work – through BackyardImage, quite often – and approach me to either license a file directly for a print, or for a license to use my work in some other way. All these efforts to try to market my work for potential buyers through my website and social media are finally paying off.

I’ve been plugging Etsy more recently and currently have 30 images for sale there. It is harder work creating these product listings – perhaps 30 minutes of work per listing I would guess, but I’m getting traction. I am using Etsy ads to push my work on their site. In July I spent $40 on ads (you pay for a click) and earned $209 in net earnings (after production and shipping costs). The smaller prints (up to 14×11 inches), I print at home and ship in a cardboard envelope. The larger prints (a 24×12 inch metal print this month) are produced and shipped by Pictorem. The metal print was a nice surprise – someone contacted me via the site to ask if I could create a panoramic metal print of my New River Gorge image. Of course I could! She went on to buy it the next day!

All told, Etsy had a profit of $166 this month, without much effort on my part. I plan to create more products once I have got through all my keywording and uploading of images to the stock agencies!

Trying a new money maker – licensing my voice!

As you know, I like trying new things, even though they may not always work out. What I am just starting to try is the creation of YouTube videos (and perhaps Podcasts) using my own voice reading the script using AI. Eleven Labs is a leader in this space, and they also allow other people generating audio to use one of their professional voices to read their text. I’ve uploaded about 40 minutes of my narration to their site and have now been accepted as a professional voice. I’ve only earned $1.04 so far, but I have only been there for 2 days. I have an affiliate link for Eleven Labs in case you are interested in something similar (creating audio from professional voices or providing your own) and I will update you in the coming months if it turns into anything. In the meantime, here is a very rough video of part of this blog post.

Hope you had a reasonable month, and we will all continue to hope for good results as the year progresses.