Stock Photography in 2025

I am long overdue for giving an update to my adventure of becoming a full time stock photographer - my last update was in 2022! Back in 2022, I had just begun to push myself to be on all the different stock platforms (instead of just Adobe). Things have really exploded from there! Since then, I pushed myself to capture as much landscape and cityscape media as I could (including video), and now I have grown my submitted portfolio from less than 10,000 files to nearly 40,000. 

It’s reached the point that I travel so much and output so many photos that I can’t even BEGIN to share every trip or my favorite shots online. You may have noticed I’ve left most of social media as well. I still blog monthly (often about my work), but it doesn’t scratch the surface of what I’ve been doing. I just decided it is better to put my head down and capture images than it is to spend time figuring out how to share it online (other than the stock websites of course).

When it comes to stock media sales, I was curious if the number of files online, particularly the number being uploaded each month, had an impact on sales. If 10K files makes $1000/mo, does 40K files make $4000/mo? Short answer? Not really.

But markets are so extremely complicated to predict, from seasonal trends to mergers between platforms to specials they run to AI changing the entire landscape.

What I did observe between 2022 and 2024 were sales literally tripling year over year. By the end of 2024, my stock photography for the first time became a noticeable piece of my income pie. Now, in 2025, I am happy to say that all my travelling and equipment is covered by stock sales, and there is a little profit on top. It is pretty nice being able to have a travel budget that pays for itself!

But all that is to say that 2025 has been quite an unusual year in sales. Despite the pattern of growth I saw from 2022-2024, this year has been very inconsistent, unpredictable, and certainly not remotely tripling in sales. Of course I know triple sales was unsustainable, but I had thought I found the pattern in # of images resulting in $ of sales and despite that - my formula has failed me.

(chart of total sales across the 3 years)

That is where AI comes into the conversation. AI has done some amazing things and some terrible things, and I wanted to take a moment to break down the PROS and CONS in my personal experience as a stock photographer.

Pros of AI in 2025 as a Stock Photographer

For anyone that has processed a stock image for publishing, you KNOW how time consuming it is to go through every image and develop a proper title, caption, and keywords. This is the most important step to getting your images found online. I have tried all sorts of things to speed up my process. Where I have landed now is something I spent 100+ hours fine tuning - a process with Open AI that can produce perfect titles, captions, and keywords (better than I can do manually in my opinion) to SCALE and for CHEAP.

The workflow is the part that was time consuming to develop, but at its core, I am simply using Open AI to describe my image in detail before converting that description into Stock websites Title, Caption, and Keywords. The prompts are quite detailed to really get these outputs exactly what is best practice. NONE of this would be possible if Open AI’s ability to analyze an image wasn’t INSANELY accurate.

I demonstrated this last year, giving examples of how descriptive Open AI could be just from seeing a thumbnail.

So you can certainly just go into Chat GPT, drag your image in, and ask it for a title, caption, and keywords. The 100+ hours comes into play because of my compulsive nature to streamline everything. Now I can process literally 2000 images from start to finish in about four hours. The end result is the metadata saved into the images themselves, ready to submit to ANY platform.

The best part is that it only costs Open AI about $0.0062 per file (yes about half a cent). A batch of 2000 files is around $12. For perspective, if I instead processed those the old fashioned way, it would take an hour to maybe do 100 files (MAYBE). 20 hours of work done in 4 hours for $12 is not bad.

So - That, is my #1 Pro of AI in 2025. If it were not for this technology, there is NO way I would have the stamina or resolve to have grown my portfolio from 10K to 40K in less than four years. I would be spending way too much of my time doing the most mindless hair-pulling task of developing titles, captions, and keywords. 

#2 - AI Generator Sales. It is a double edged sword, but AI models feed off of real images and many stock websites do reimburse you for that usage. So there are some good chunks of sales (typically paid out annually) from places like Adobe and Pond5 thanks to AI. I call it double edged, due to the CONS I’ll go into next.

Cons of AI as a Stock Photographer

This will perhaps seem very obvious - but now that AI images are so easy to generate and the platforms are flooded with AI Generated images - sales are no doubt being affected depending on your niche.

I’d like to think that landscapes and cityscapes of specific places are hard for AI to replace. They still don’t do a great job of, say, making an image of the skyline of Las Vegas. No real-world user needing that image wants one where it is literally NOT correct to reality. Since those types of images are what make up most of my portfolio, I think that explains why my sales haven’t distinctly dropped thanks to AI. But I do still think lower sales than expected in 2025 are attributed, at least in part, to AI being so much better.

For example, I also love to capture all sorts of detail shots - a brick wall, the bark of a tree, different wildlife or plants. Subjects like this that are more generic and not location-based are prime pickings for AI to produce similar, or in some cases, better images. 

One great example I stumbled upon was when I was planning a photoshoot at a bee farm and was curious what the competition looked like on Adobe Stock. Check it out yourself, and you will be presented with vibrant colorful photos of bees; however, if you update the search to hide Generative AI images, you get a very different picture. The images aren’t as perfect or colorful - because they are realistic. But all that matters is what the BUYER wants.

As days go past, it becomes harder and harder to tell AI from reality (anyone who fell for the backyard footage of bunnies jumping on a trampoline knows exactly what I mean).  

Will Stock Photography Survive?

Short answer - YES. I can’t imagine a world where AI can fully replace photographers out in the real world…yet. Yes, AI will always feed off our work and produce their versions of it, and yes that will take sales away from us unfortunately. But the need for realism will always persist.

With that, I am going to share with you an UPDATED list of my TOP 10 best selling photos of all time across all platforms (and it is worth noting that in 2025 alone, 7 of the 10 are the same!). I’ll admit sometimes the ones that make it are very unexpected and certainly don’t represent the quality of my work - but that is kind of what makes it interesting!

Unlike last time, I’ll also include the actual total sales and total downloads for each image as well.

#1 Beautiful Isolated Lake Tucked Into Mountains Surrounded By Pine Trees

$478.79 / 566 Downloads

#2 Aerial Of Grounds Of College Campus In Northeast Indiana

$381.16 / 534 Downloads

#3 Looking Down Rows Of Apple Trees In Orchard Farm

$360.36 / 517 Downloads

#4 Landscaping On Middleclass Homes Aerial Neighborhood Fresh Cut Lawns

$246.25 / 441 Downloads

#5 Panoramic Skyline Of Fort Wayne With Buildings And Trees And Roads

$301.02 / 345 Downloads

#6 United States College Campus Aerial Of Green Grounds

$236.11 / 279 Downloads

#7 Luxury Outdoor Deck With Fire Pit Seating And Rattan Lounge Area

$204.72 / 237 Downloads

#8 Aerial View Of Milwaukee Hoan Bridge And Urban Skyline

$141.13 / 213 Downloads

#9 Charming American Townhouses With Flag Sunny Suburban Street

$164.60 / 213 Downloads

#10 Aerial Coit Tower In Late Afternoon With Downtown San Francisco Skyscrapers And Distant Bridge

$129.08 / 207 Downloads