Making money from Photography April 2025
This was a month of highs and lows. The High was undoubtedly that my earnings from Adobe Stock finally hit the $1000 mark, marking a tremendous journey for that agency since it was created from Fotolia all those years ago. The Low was the very low level of print sales in the month. Perhaps it is just the time of year!
Overall, I hit $2723 as my total earnings number for the month of April 2025. This is my usual graph, folowed by the file count. I have been adding quite a lot of images from my trip to Egypt last year. I have very low expectations of sales, but any sale is better than nothing! If anyone is interested, I have completed a massive task of writing articles illustrated by my photos about this cruise/trip to Egypt and Jordan.
Stock Agency Performance in April 2025
It is no surprise if I report that Adobe Stock was my best agency in April with total sales there of $1013.67. It is nice to see some higher priced sales there as well as I will report later. This is the first time over $1000 and nicely beats the March total of $897. Next was, of course iStock with $491. I found this one a bit confusing – the website shows earnings of $360 or so for the month, but the deposit was $491. No indication of the reason for the discrepancy, but I don’t think I will complain. Our favorite agency, SS, came in with a miserly $305. It is hard to believe that this was the agency to beat for so many years. Then Alamy at $215 and Canva continues its month by month decline with just $101 this month. With those sorts of changes, it is good that Adobe is powering ahead.
Fine Art Sales
I sold just two small prints on Etsy that I printed and mailed myself, which helps the margins, and one jigsaw on Fine Art America. My commercial clients were better with about $60 from the company that leases prints and $250 from wall murals. Overall, these sales have been very helpful in maintaining overall earnings and I’ve no reason to believe that they will not recover as the year progresses. Here is my graph comparing stock with fine art over the years. It is nice to see an increase in pure stock sales for a change!
Individual best sellers in April 2025
I mentioned some nice high priced sales on Adobe. This was the first at $52:
And then this one from Honolulu also sold for $52 on Adobe:
And would you believe a third image at $52 – this time again from Oahu.
Then 3 videos on Adobe for $28 each made for a fantastic set of earnings. Altogether I had 18 downloads of more than $10 this month for a total of $495. Makes a tremendous difference to the earnings in the month.
The prize for the strangest amount this month goes to Shutterstock with a sale of an image for $17.76 (my share). Take a look at the description of the image to see the strange coincidence!
If only that building had been 2776 feet high!
Incidentally, there was also a good sale on Alamy of this image from a buried temple in Rome that was still being excavated when I visited.
The earnings for this download were $50, but it has made $190 since I took it. Well worth the effort to upload it. I’m hoping a few of my Egyptian images will start to earn something like that!
That is about it for another month. I still have images to process and upload, which I will continue working on this month and then do some more traveling. Travel shots are still outside the reach of AI generation!
Here is a nice AI sunset over the New River Gorge bridge from CoPilot:
And my version that has earned over $2000 plus quite a number of print sales. Hope for me yet, (I hope!)
