Monthly Photography Earnings: Income from online photography sales in October 2025

Stock Photography vs Fine Art Print Sales

Each month for the past 15 years, I have been openly publishing real, honest articles about making money from licensing photos with stock photography agencies such as Shutterstock, iStock and Adobe Stock and more recently exploring how to sell your best prints online with Fine Art America, Pictorem and Etsy. Again, with real results and real numbers, not the sort of fluff we increasingly see online!

Why, I sometimes ask myself? Partly because I’m proud of how I have done over the years in a competitive and difficult industry, and partly because I have enjoyed helping others. And to be honest, partly to earn a little extra from my books on Stock Photography and Selling your Fine Art Prints Online. Now I have an audio version of my Selling Prints book – perfect for listening to in the car – although no-one has purchase it yet! I’ve started creating videos of my monthly earnings reports on YouTube as I thought it would be interesting to try to monetize my YouTube Channel. I do need subscribers though!

I’m sure you are thinking that he is about to announce the end of these reports! No – I thought it would help people who come across these reports through a search to understand what this site is all about and I also asked ChatGPT how to improve the ranking of this website. Guess what it said!

How much can you really earn from stock photos and prints?

Another active month for me. I have actually caught up with all my image processing, keywording and uploading to the stock agencies so I spent some of that released spare time to create my first Audiobook about selling Fine Art Photography, and also uploaded some more images to my own fine art sites. Even after all these years, I still find it very difficult to choose what I think is my best work for a competition or to upload to Etsy. We are our own worst judges, I guess!

Update to September 2025 earnings with a fantastic set of print sales

I try to report all the money earned in a particular month in my monthly reports, with one obvious exception – iStock and Canva are always one month behind as they don’t report earnings until the middle of the following month. There are a few sites that report in the first week, but they are small and I estimate the earnings and then correct when the real numbers come in. I was amazed when I checked one site and instead of the expected $75, I saw $1391! It is a small company that organizes art for companies that I was invited to join several years ago, and I had been chatting earlier in the summer with one of their art advisors about whether I had others similar to one of my macro images of a seed pod.

Little did I know that he actually sold eight framed prints for the offices of a financial services company and the payments came through in September. I hope to get a photo of the installation itself, but here are the photos purchased.

To keep my financial systems straight, I have updated the September earnings totals and the graphs that went with those and then recorded my October earnings in the usual way. That makes the September earnings total now $4171. A hard number to beat unless I can get my prints flying off the walls as we approach the holidays and gift buying season!

And one final update for September. I reported last month that someone wanted to license three of my images for an in-house magazine and asked for 10,000-pixel wide images. I thought I had really annoyed him with my facetious reply and didn’t hear from him again. But this month he was back and downloaded the three images after paying the $100 on his credit card. I’ll report this as income for October.

Back to earth now with my report on October sales from stock and fine art photography.

Earnings from stock photo agencies and print on demand sites in October 2025

Now that most of the earnings have been posted on the stock sites, my total income from stock photos, stock videos and print sales in October is $3363. The month developed well with sales occurring pretty steadily in each week of the month which is nice to see.

Here is my normal chart that shows the total earnings from selling online photography over the past six years or so.

It is very gratifying to see a month that is actually higher than the same month in previous years. There have been six months this year when the total earnings ended up being higher than most of the previous six years.

And how many photo files or assets did I need to generate that income? A lot! Almost 23,000 at DepositPhotos, although the agencies that generate the most income have less. Adobe Stock has 15370, for instance.

I didn’t actually add many new images in October – I had completed my major uploads in the previous month.

Earnings from the major stock photo agencies in October 2025

A new chart for you this month – a pie chart showing the income and size of contribution from each of the major stock photo agencies in October.

As you can see, Adobe, once again, was the major contributor to my income but was down a little from September. Alamy gained almost $200 from the DACS payment for 2025. I guess I should really spread that out over each of the months, but that does sound like more work than it is worth! Shutterstock made a big improvement from September – almost $120 more, although their AI payout of $35 contributed to that. iStock was also much better than last month.

Earnings from higher priced photos licensed for more than $10

I report on this each month as it is a great indicator of a promising month. I reported that last month was not great with just $82 in over-$10 sales, but I went back to check now that the iStock downloads have appeared in Microstockr, and amazingly, there was one sale on Getty that netted me $75! As we only get 15% of Getty sales that means they must have paid $500 for that license. Must be a fantastic piece of art, you are thinking. Well, here it is:

It is an image I took in China in 2018. Who says that travel photography doesn’t pay!

I’ve also noticed an increase in $13 licenses from Dreamstime this year. This license is most likely a 50-credit Extended License which is the most extensive license and allows Resale on Merchandise including posters, calendars, puzzles etc. So, as I surmised before people could be using these for prints that they are offering for sale. I always knew this was a risk, but extended licenses have been few and far between in the past. Not so in 2025. 43 of them from Dreamstime for $575, including three in October. Here are the ones licensed so far in 2025:

Big decision – should I remove my images from Dreamstime, or are these sales that I would not have received in any other way? I doubt very much that some individual looking for a print from their wall, would go to Dreamstime and then choose the most expensive license. Assuming they decided to pay for the file, you would think they would choose the cheapest license. So, these are more likely to be commercial purchases for a calendar or similar usage. I will perhaps search around to see if I can find any of these files in use.

In October, I earned a total of $327 from sales of more than $10 with 17 downloads. Much better!

I sold my favorite cat on Adobe Stock this month as well for $26. I don’t tend to get many high value sales with Adobe, but this one brought the earnings from this one photo to $5500!

Sticking with Adobe as I then sold a photo of my car being recharged at a public electric car charging station for $24 and also an old photo of a pack of Juul nicotine dispensers for $21. I’m liking what I’m seeing with Adobe – higher priced sales and more recently I see older images suddenly starting to sell reasonably well which must mean they are not just prioritizing high sellers in their search results.

This editorial image of the Mark Twain home and museum in Hannibal, MO, sold on Shutterstock for $30:

And this one of the Tower of Belem in Lisbon, Portugal sold on Alamy for $30. Don’t tell Alex from Brutally Honest Stock as I am sure he has something similar in his portfolio!

Earnings from selling fine art photo prints in October 2025

As you know, I am several years into a transition from getting most of my income from stock photo agencies such as Adobe Stock, iStock and so on, towards a strong focus towards making my best work available as prints. This is not for the faint-hearted. Prints in galleries, especially in a wealthy or popular tourist town, sell mainly because people see an image they like, they want a memory of their vacation, perhaps, and they buy it. Selling prints from an online portfolio is massively different and massively more difficult in my opinion. Why? Because people need to have a need or desire for a print and then they need to find your specific print using a search engine – normally on Google. I’ve put all my wisdom on how best to help them achieve that in my book – Selling your Fine Art Photography Online, available on my website as an eBook and an audiobook, and on Amazon.

September turned out to be massive with almost $2200 of print sales. And let me make that clear – this is $2200 of profit from print sales, not the cost of the prints themselves.

October was unlikely to meet that total and ended with $984. Still very nice!

October has had some great individual sales. This one of the moon rising over the historic Woodburn Hall at West Virginia University was sold on the Pictorem site as a 60×42 inch canvas print to someone in South Carolina. As usual, there is no real way to track how or where the buyer first saw it, but it is an image that I have promoted in my other website BackyardImage.com. I wrote a story about trying to capture the moonrise over WVU in Morgantown in this post and linked through to the image in my Pictorem store. That makes me think that either the buyer saw that article or did a search on Google and I ranked higher with my Pictorem print because of the extra visibility through my own article.

The profit on this sale was $507.

I also sold a small 16×8 inch framed print of this panorama of Coopers Rock outside Morgantown in West Virginia for a $45 profit.

This was sold on Fine Art America to a buyer from Pennsylvania. Fine Art America now gives you the location and email address of the buyer. I haven’t tried to contact anyone – my attempts to do that when Pictorem provides the email have not been successful – no response both times I tried. I don’t recall writing about this particular image anywhere, so it looks like it was a lucky search for me!

Here is my chart comparing fine art sales with stock photo licensing over the past few years.

It is great to see the continuing level of print sales, but also a bit of a bump in stock photo income as well. Perhaps this final quarter of the year will be a good one!

Let me know what you think of this new information and style of this report and please subscribe to YouTube so that you will see when I publish my video version of my monthly report of earnings from photography.