Update on Photography earnings from stock and prints

A month away from the keyboard makes this a double earnings report on online sales from stock agencies and print sales for May and June 2025. I spent half of May and June away in Greenland, Iceland and then the UK with many, many images and videos still to process, but now I am back reporting on the results for those months. And what interesting months they turned out to be.

But first, the top line numbers:

As you can see from this increasingly complex chart, May came in with earnings of $3157 and June had total earnings of $4215 thanks to Adobe. I’ll do a slightly different version of the chart that shows my portfolio asset numbers as I have been adding a lot of files lately from both the Egypt trip last year and some early images from New York and Greenland which I just managed to get uploaded before I left on a trip to Las Vegas last week:

As you can see, I have been uploading files for over15 years now in a reasonably steady progression. I now have 21850 with DepositPhotos and 14500 with Adobe. Even though I doubt if many of my Egypt images will sell, perhaps there is a strategy there – I am filling my Adobe portfolio with interesting non-sellers that they may want to pick up in their next annual purchase of images for their free download library!

Interesting sideline – article explaining stock photography

Just before I get into more details, I wanted to draw your attention to an article I saw that is a pretty good explanation of stock photography and the different agencies you can use. Of course I’ve written my own book about getting started in stock photography, although I haven’t updated it recently. And there is my YouTube video of a presentation I gave a couple of years back to a photo group. But please check out that article for a more up to date explanation.

Earnings in May and June 2025 from photography

Halfway through 2025 already and I must admit to being satisfied with the results so far. It would be fantastic if my income from photography had followed that graph of uploads above, but of course, that is not how the business works these days. As the number of images online increases, the earnings per image and per download decreases! However, I am managed to keep a pretty even set of earnings partly from hard work in uploading new content and starting up my print business, and partly from luck in having the right images available online. I have said many times before that you need to treat this as a job – not a hobby, and that means many hours processing the images that you take (which is often fun), and many more hours adding relevant keywords and descriptions (which is less fun!). I try hard to make my keywords relevant and include different words for images that perhaps are of similar subjects, and I have found the latest AI keyword generators to be helpful to get the first 30 of so keywords for an image to which I add my own ones that I think are more unique. I last wrote about AI driven keywording here.

I didn’t actually know what my May earnings were until I finished the spreadsheet this morning, but I’m pretty pleased that I managed to exceed $3000 again and ended the month with $3157. Highlights were $803 from Adobe Stock, which was a drop from the fantastic $1013 in April, but still very welcome. SS managed to get into second place with $430 and iStock next with $370. The other agencies were nothing special, but what made the month was a great sale in my Etsy store of a 40×30 inch acrylic print of one of my digital paintings:

Because of the occasional one-off payments that we have been seeing for licensing of free images from Adobe, or the AI payouts, I have been removing those one-off payments from one of the calculations in my spreadsheet and spreading them over the period they cover. Using those numbers, May had stock sales of $2346 and fine art was $955. It is great to see my work in putting my best images into Print on Demand sites and now my Etsy store paying off.

Earnings in June were well out of the ordinary thanks to Adobe. The total was $4215 of which Adobe contributed $2351. SS was next with $417 and iStock with $392. Alamy was not bad with $264. If there is one agency that is disappointing month by month, it is Canva. A year ago, I regularly received $170 to $180 a month, but every month since then has shown a reduction and in June 2025, it dropped below $100 to end with $93. Of course, they can change their approach and offer more AI generated imagery for their customers, but it is a little sad to see as a long-term contributor.

I was not sure how to approach the Adobe free image offer this year. The purchase price of the one-year deal was reduced from $5 to $4 and they introduced a new “lifetime” buyout offer of $10. We don’t really know how long these offers will be available and how the pricing will change in future years – apart from an obvious conclusion that they are unlikely to offer more money in future. In the end, I removed the images that I thought might be interesting to buyers in the coming years, especially ones that were relatively new, and I removed a few more from the lifetime buyout, but I decided to mark the rest as being available for the lifetime purchase. In the end, they accepted 79 for a one-year deal and 129 for lifetime purchase.

If I apply my amortization schedule to the June numbers and remove that one-off Adobe payment, I ended June with $2335 in stock earnings and $487 in prints. My Etsy store was in vacation mode for much of the time (as I can’t fulfil print orders when I am traveling) so that is not too bad.

Historic analysis of stock versus fine art print sales

Using the smoothing out technique on the one-off payouts, gives me a good idea of how the business is going overall. This chart shows the past 4 years of earnings:

There was a steady decline in stock sales during 2023 and into early 2024, but it does appear that it has been reversed to some extent. We are not back to the level of stock earnings that I saw in 2022, but it is not declining at the moment. So, uploads of new content are balancing out the decline in earnings per file! And, the print sales are showing a little more stability. I haven’t uploaded any new files to my PoD sites since last fall, but I will get my latest images processed and get to work on selecting the best ones for upload and try to increase sales a bit more. I will also try to get out more with my new drone (the DJI Mavic 3 Pro) and try to sell my older Mavic 2 Pro! If you live in the US and are interested in a good drone, just let me know!

Interesting sales in May and June 2025

The difference between an average and a great month often comes down to the number of larger license prices I receive. I generally look at the number of images that were licensed for more than $10 in the month. In May, that turned out to be 18 files for a total of $515, and in June 17 files for $414.

In May, there was a nice $87 sale of a video of students leaving WVU in Morgantown, West Virginia (and then I got nothing from Pond5 in June!), but the surprise was two sales of drone shots from Kauai for $87 each from Shutterstock:

Those drones can certainly pay for themselves!

I didn’t often see higher prices sales from Adobe, but there were a couple in May for $26.40, including this one from West Virginia:

Also a drone shot!

In June, there were no $80+ sales of images, which I must admit are very rare! But Shutterstock did sell this very old image of a senior man changing an air filter while balancing precariously!

This one has earned over $1000 so far. Not bad for a very simple concept.

Shutterstock did sell another drone shot of Tunnels beach on Kauai – this time for $26.79.

And one of my Egypt shots sold on Alamy for $15. It is a start, I guess, to pay back the cost of that trip!

I think that is about all I have for you this month – and I have many images to process and keyword. More at the end of July!

Hope you continue to find these articles interesting.