Making Money from Online Photography – January 2026

A new year comes round, and we start again earning money from the online sale of photography! Last year turned out to be great – with over $40,000 in income, but January usually starts more slowly. Certainly, that was the case with fine art sales after the December rush for gifts, and also Shutterstock continues its money grab with a reduction in the commission rate back to 15% for all their contributors. I hated this when they first did it and every year it reminds me how good Shutterstock used to be and now is a shadow of its former self. I have managed to increase my commission now to 25%, but there is absolutely no logic behind what they do to us year after year.

Overall income for January 2026

My income in January turned out to be $3281 and I’m reasonably pleased with that, to be honest. This total is pretty much the same as January 2025 and nicely above the previous years for that month. Here is my usual graph of the earnings in each month for the past 5 years.

Number of Assets in the main stock agencies

If I don’t include this graph, I usually get asked the question in the comments! I added just short of 200 images/videos in January.

Stock Image performance compared to Fine Art Sales

I deliberately made the decision in 2020 to become diversified in terms of the focus of my photography work. I have always liked the warm feeling of selling a print that is going to be on someone’s wall and that feeling is much more intense than seeing one of my images on a website or in a magazine, and so I uploaded my existing portfolio to Pictorem to broaden the reach beyond Fine Art America, and I have more recently started my store on Etsy. If you decide to create a portfolio on Pictorem, I have an affiliate link you can use here. And I am glad I did! My income from the stock agencies has been reducing over time and the income from fine art prints increasing. So the decision was well timed! Here is my graph comparing those two income streams:

The stock photo income increased from December and fine art dropped, as you might expect with the December holiday season. Overall, the trend is positive! The underlying numbers were $2247 from stock photos and videos and $1195 from Fine art sales.

Performance of the stock agencies in January

No surprises which agency earned the most in January – Adobe Stock. The month started strong with many sales at the $1.20 level, increasing to many around $1.46 and then sinking towards the more normal $1.06 at the end of the month. I don’t recall that pattern last year, but I saw in a forum that this is normal for Adobe? I’m not sure why that would be, but I am certainly pleased to see those higher numbers! As a result, I think this was the highest earnings from Adobe Stock outside those unusual months when there is a free image buyout or an AI bonus.

iStock was disappointing after a $620 month in November. This does go up and down depending on the number of larger priced sales in the month, but this is quite a low result for me. Alamy was a bit better than normal and that agency is again very dependent on some higher priced sales that I will mention later in this report.

Our favorite agency ended up with $226 – with the disgusting commission rate of 15% in the early weeks of the month.

The real disappointment to me was Pond5 with 2 sales on the last day of the month that resulted in income of less than $1! $87 last month, $0.78 this month! Crazy!

Canva just reduces month by month without fail. I can see that disappearing as a notable income stream this year.

Here is the same information in a chart:

Interesting Sales of photos and videos in January 2026

I usually look at the larger priced sales that make such a difference in the month. I know that Alex from Brutally Honest Stock Photography does something similar each month and I am always surprised that he struggles to get the same level of payout as I achieve. He has a similar level of images on Alamy but his highest earner this month was $17 whereas I have a $38, $32, $12, $12 and $11 from that same agency. I wish I had a suggestion to make to him as there is nothing wrong with his work. There was always a belief that your portfolio on Alamy could have a higher ranking than others and at one point I moved some images into a different portfolio with my higher selling pieces, but I’m not sure it makes much of a difference. But there might be something in my history with that site that is ranking my images higher in the searches.

Here are my best earners in January:

This was the next one on Alamy, sold for $32:

And Shutterstock sold this one (late in the month, thank goodness) and I received $27:

This is a favorite of mine, taken in great conditions shortly after dawn over the Tidal Basin in Washington DC. It has earned over $3000 from the stock agencies and, of course, is this Jefferson Memorial cherry blossom image is available in my Etsy store in a range of print sizes!

Dreamstime arose from the dead with a $13 sale of the Supreme Court courthouse in Denver Colorado. I usually think these are print sales, but I’m not sure about this one:

I actually sold six videos on Adobe Stock this month for around $12 each. Not something that happens too often for me. This is one of them – a photo shoot with benefits!

Fine Art Sales in January 2026

$1195 from the collection of outlets for my Fine Art Photography. Some of these were print sales from Pictorem and Fine Art America, with about $430 from the former and just $32 from the latter after a great December. Etsy was slow with just four sales in the month, of paper prints at 10×8 inches or 14×11 inches, which I print at home and mail to the customer which makes them reasonably profitable. However, the $3 a day budget for advertising charges ate into this in January.

I always look forward to those contacts from either Fine Art America or Pictorem contact forms. No, not those spam ones that seem endless, the ones from real people! This month someone writing an article for a magazine about an Alaskan cruise wrote to me to ask if they could license one of my prints:

Their normal rate for a half page is $250, which seemed good to me. Later, they asked if I had something for the table of contents page with a $150 fee. I do count these as fine art sales as they come from someone finding my prints on my portfolio site, not via a stock agency.

That rounds up my review of sales from photography online in January 2026. As I said, a solid month and I hope the start of a solid year!