Online earnings as a photographer in August 2025
August is always a low earning month and, boy, it didn’t disappoint this year. Almost everything was down, and I ended the month with total earnings of $2235. Last year I had managed $2584 and the year before $2758 so I would have to go back quite a number of years to get earnings this low. I blame myself a little – I have been really focused on getting the images from a cruise around Iceland finished, keyworded and online and even though I use Phototag.ai pretty comprehensively these days (see this article for my tests of two competing AI keywording systems) it still takes a long time to add descriptions that are meaningful and will help the files be found. I don’t tend to like the flowery descriptions that most AI systems seem to think is normal and so I generally make up my own. I’ve also been spending time properly recording my voice for ElevenLabs, the AI cloning application. My first attempt at recording 45 minutes of professional audio was not accepted for their highest tier of “High Quality Professional voices” which has the best earning results, because they could detect some reverberation in my recordings and so I created a knocked together audio booth and recorded everything again. Getting rid of the breaths and other issues takes a long time!
As a result of all this, I have paid no attention to even getting new fine art prints online at either Pictorem or Etsy and have not spent much time pushing them on social media. As a result, I sold no new prints in August, which is a disappointment. On the plus side, I spent a week touring around the Cascade Loop in Washington State and so I now have 1000 more photos to work through. I’ve said this before – you need to treat this as a job and really put the time into it as though you had a boss breathing down your neck!
Earnings from Stock and Fine Art Photography
Here is my normal graph of the historic earnings. You can see the August results and traditionally poor, but this set a new level!
And this is the graph of how many assets I have at the main agencies:
And a different graph this month – this shows how much effort I have been putting into uploading images to those agencies. There is a real uptick in the uploads over the last 9 months or so.
Keeping with the graphs, my final one shows how stock earnings have been trending compared to the income I get from selling prints of my work. There was a residual amount of earnings from the companies that lease my images to corporate offices and also offer wall mural size prints, but there were no specific sales this past month.
Performance of the stock agencies
No prizes for guessing the best agency in August – yes, it was Most Photos! Sorry, typo there, it was Adobe Stock with $804. Surprisingly, Shutterstock put on a good showing to come in in second place with $345, beating a mediocre iStock which earned $304. Next comes Alamy at $203. Dreamstime was the out and out surprise in July with that set of $13 sales of images of Kauai, and it didn’t do too badly in August with $99. Canva continues its month by month decline to $91 – it is almost as though they are slowly dropping the earnings due to some algorithm. And quite a lot of agencies earned nothing – Most Photos among them!
Better selling images in August 2025
I thought of calling this the best-selling images, but with the highest earner in the month getting just $30, it didn’t really seem appropriate!
Overall, I had 13 downloads that earned more than $10 in the month for a total of $257. That compares with 41 for $803 in July, although the rush of $13 sales on Dreamstime really helped in that month.
The highest earner was this simple shot of a red panda resting in a tree taken in a zoo and sold on Alamy for $30.
Then we had this image of a Viking cruise ship anchored in Alaska that sold on Shutterstock for $29.84. Although SS isn’t a great total earner, it still brings in some of these higher priced sales:
I was very pleased to see a high-priced sale from Adobe Stock this month. Not something that happens very often, but this drone sunrise image of Tunnels Beach on Kauai earned $26.40.
And another on SS for $26. This takes me back in time when there was a company called Image Brief that offered specific briefs to photographers and quite a number of them were for simple food shots from local restaurants that offered take-outs for delivery. So, I got to get the food, photograph it, eat it and get paid (and I still get paid from time to time!)
That rounds off the month for me – time to get back to processing images from Washington! If you get the chance, check out Alex’s Brutally Honest site – he has been working hard on a book about the legalities of flying a drone in Europe and I got the chance to read the pre-published version. Very comprehensive! Here is his latest earnings report. And, if you are into food photography, Annie has written another ebook – this time about editing your food photography to make it delicious. I think she has a free download as well as a sampler.
I will try to get a video made of this earnings report soon! Check out my YouTube channel for that and subscribe so that you will get a chance to see it.
