Monthly Earnings from online photography – February 2026

Total Earnings from online photography sales in February 2026

A new month comes around, and as we all know, February is always a tricky one. With only 28 days, you inherently lose a bit of earning time compared to January, so I usually expect a slight dip in the results. Last month I hit $3,281, which was a great start to the year. For February, I ended up finishing just shy of the $3,000 mark at $2994.

Here is my usual graph showing the growth of earnings over the past 4 years and then the number of assets I have in the main stock photo agencies to generate that income.

My total income across all streams in February turned out to be $2,994.70. I’m perfectly happy with that, to be honest. It is always a bit disappointing to narrowly miss a round number milestone, but for a short month, it shows the portfolio is still working hard. If anyone can send me $0.30, I will feel much better to report $3000! If only I had hit the Shutterstock level increase a few hours earlier.

Stock Photo income compared to Fine Art Sales

When we break that down by category, the underlying numbers were $1,919.84 from stock photos and videos, and $1,074.86 from fine art sales. The stock photo income has dropped a bit from the start of the year probably due to the reduced number of days in the month, but the fine art side of the business had a very solid month.

As this graph from 2021 shows, my stock income seems to follow a pattern where the summer months reach a peak each year, but those peaks are diminishing year by year. Hopefully it will repeat again and the stock earnings will grow, but who knows! The fine art print sales are showing a more reliable trend with the major growth starting in 2024 when I really started focusing on this and giving me some solid earnings each month. It is much more variable, depending on fewer sales in total with much more variability in each sale in terms of what was ordered.

Stock Agency Earnings Performance

No surprises which agency earned the most in February – Adobe Stock. It continues to be the undisputed heavyweight champion of the portfolio, bringing in $844.89. While it is a step down from the fantastic $1,041 it generated in January, it still carries the lion’s share of the stock income and remains very reliable. iStock was better than previous months with $363 and then SS brought in the third place with $246. Shutterstock was heading for a very poor month with about $170 in earnings up until the final 3 days of the month when I got some large sales that added about $85 to the total. It is interesting to eyeball the number of downloads from SS – January 2025 was 520. It stayed around 470 – 520 through July 2025. The last three months have been 340, 346 and 343 in February. Not a great sign for the future.

My chart of earnings from the major agencies tells the rest of the picture:

and the same table in a graphical form:

My disappointments – Canva is on almost a mathematical decline. Each month is a few dollars less than the month below. I’ve started using Google Gemini Pro a lot more these days and asked it to produce a graph of Canva earnings from my spreadsheet:

I also asked for a prediction of when earnings from Canva would reach zero – January 2027! You heard it first from BackyardSilver.com!

One interesting note in these results. I added my voice as a “Professional Voice” to ElevenLabs last summer and set it up for licensing (as well as using my voice to narrate videos and articles on my websites. It earned $74 in February from licensed usage. I’ve no idea how to find out where it was used, but someone must be listening to me!

Interesting Sales for more than $10

What a sad world when interesting sales are those over $10! But I continue to use this as some measure of a good month. January had $265 from 17 downloads. February, nothing like as impressive with 7 downloads for $125.

For the first time, maybe ever, Adobe Stock had the largest sale with this one of the Supreme Court in Washington DC which sold for $26. This was all thanks to the court decision on tariffs and that image went on to earn a total of $62 from 50 downloads in the month.

Shutterstock was next with a $25 of this editorial image of a Viking Mississippi river cruise boat docked in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I do pretty well with these sales of out of the way places used to illustrate travel articles, I assume.

I had three $13 sales from Dreamstime this month, one of them of La Crosse again, and two of Washington DC.

Fine Art Photography Print Sales in February 2026

I earned $1,074.86 from the collection of outlets for my Fine Art Photography. I have always liked the warm feeling of selling a print that is going to be on someone’s wall, and to clear the $1,000 mark in a short month is very gratifying.

Etsy turned in a great performance with $485 in net earnings after deducting their fees and production costs. I’ve been trying to get more traction on higher priced sales in the past few weeks. I did sell a 40×30 inch canvas of the skyline of Austin Texas, which is the first time I have broken into that market. I asked the buyer how they found it, and as usual it was a Google search for an image for their wall, which led them to Etsy, and there they saw an Etsy ad which led to my image. So increasing visibility as much as I can for Google is still a good strategy for me.

I wrote an article about my approach on Etsy last week which might be useful for those thinking of setting up an Etsy store to sell fine art. Over the past few days, I have been updating my store listings. I originally had a 24×72 triptych on most of the early listings, which is far too narrow for many images, and so I updated those listings to include a 40×60 triptych instead. I also reduced the prices for acrylic versions of this as I had some pretty high prices for some reason, and finally, I removed my normal 25% off every item sale and put a 40% sale on any purchase of more than $250. I’m hoping that might push people “up-market” a little. Time will tell!

Final Thoughts

Overall, ending a 28-day month at nearly $3,000 is a result I’m perfectly happy with. The consistent baseline from Adobe Stock keeps the lights on, while the strong performance from Etsy in particular shows that the direct-to-buyer print market remains healthy and is making up a larger share of earnings. Now, onwards to March!