Making more (and more) money from stock photography

After a good month in May, Adobe helped generate a sterling month in June 2022 although it would have been a reasonable month even without that windfall from the payment for images they have taken into their free library for a year. Taking all this into account, I earned a total of $3910 which is just $3 behind my all-time high back in October 2020 in the days when I could expect to get $1000 or so in the month from Shutterstock!

I had 223 assets accepted into the free library with Adobe which gave me almost $1100 in one-time royalties. As many people know, Adobe have been choosing images that have not sold well in recent past on Adobe Stock, although they could have sold well elsewhere. I did remove some of those from my list, although most of them were no longer selling as well as they once did. Always a balance, but I feel comfortable with this $1100 payment for those images. Without the one-time payment, my month would have ended with $2793. Better than last year, but below the levels of previous years. Here is my overall earnings history chart:

I also added some files to the main agencies in June – I am processing and keywording images from a recent cruise in Alaska and so I have increased my image count by around 150 photos so far. I also took some of house painters in my development that have been accepted by most sites. I took them without the faces of the painters showing, hence they could be commercially licensed. Here is my file count per agency:

Sticking with charts for now, this is also the end of the quarter and so I have included my earnings per agency in the second quarter of this year:

As you can see, Adobe was way above any other agency because of the one-off payment, but even knocking $1100 off this figure, it would still have been in first place, followed by that agency we love so much and then iStock. Then we drop quite quickly to Canva, which has been working very well for me recently and then Alamy and so on down the list.

Highlights in June 2022

Clearly Adobe was the highest earner with $1810, but at $694 it was well in the lead with SS being next with $535. iStock was a disappointment as it fell back to $367, then Alamy with $303 and Canva with $259. Surprisingly, the next one in the list was Freepik – the infamous free stock photo site, which earned $206 in June. I wrote about my experience with Freepik earlier in the week, and as I didn’t really add many images to them in June, this might be what I can expect going forward perhaps. Time will tell, off course!

Videos contributed $202 this month with one $33 sale from Pond5, a couple of $28 ones from Adobe and two $24 ones from SS as well as the usual collection of sub $10 licenses from them.

Best Selling images in June 2022

Alamy gave me my best priced images in June with several that made the grade. This first one is probably the sort of thing that Alamy is good for – a pretty rare image of the murals inside the Domus Aurea in Rome:

This earned me $42. Of course, it is available at the other much lower priced agencies as well, just showing that buyers don’t shop around very often. Then I sold two images of this frog for the same amount of $32 on the same day on Alamy. I expected to see a refund, but nothing so far:

One on SS was actually just above these with a sale at $43.75 with a modified view of San Diego, with the water replaced by a reflection:

And then my cat sold for $24 on SS in the month as well. Altogether, Alamy gave me 7 of the greater than $10 sales, netting $172, SS gave me 6 for $133 and Dreamstime had 2 at $13 each. No photos from Adobe stock broke that $10 barrier in June, interestingly.

My fine art print stuff was less successful this month, with just one sale on Fine Art America for a $99 profit:

I’m still putting effort into that side of the business, but it does seem to be more variable and less reliable than stock earnings! I have a lot of Alaska images to put online yet, although just how well they will sell is a big unknown.

That is it for this month – more in the weeks to come!