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Adobe Stock Contributor is among the biggest contributor programs and pays generous commissions to contributors or stock photographers for high-quality images, videos, and other assets.
It’s also very convenient for anyone using Lightroom and Photoshop since you can upload photos directly from the apps to Adobe Stock. While this may not seem like a big deal, we absolutely love this feature because it saves you lots of time.
Recommended Image Editors for Stock Photos of 2022
Adobe Stock pays 33% commission for images (photos, vectors, and illustrations) and 35% for videos. This equates to $0.33 to $26.40 per image download and $2.80 to $70.00 per video download. The amount you earn per download depends on the plan and license the customer uses to download your image or video.
While your content would ideally always be downloaded with the most profitable plan, you don’t have any influence on that. All you can do is take the best possible photos (or videos), so they are downloaded more often.
Image Earnings
The amount you receive for image downloads as an Adobe Stock Contributor depends on how your image is downloaded. Customers can purchase them with subscriptions of various sizes, on-demand, or with an extended license.
You earn a 33% commission per image download, meaning you get between $0.33 and $3.30 for subscription downloads and between $21.12 and $26.40 per Extended license download.
Buyer’s Plan
Earnings per download
3 credits per month (Monthly subscriber)
$3.30
10 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$1.65 / $0.99
25 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$0.92 / $0.66
40 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$0.82 / $0.66
350+ credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$0.33 / $0.40
Extended License (On demand / Subscription)
$26.40 / $21.12
The minimum royalties for 350 and 750 monthly download subscriptions improve with the lifetime downloads of your images.
0-999 lifetime downloads: $0.33/image
1,000-9,999 lifetime downloads: $0.36/image
10,000+ lifetime downloads: $0.38/image
Video Earnings
The amount you receive for image downloads as an Adobe Stock Contributor depends on how your image is downloaded. Customers can purchase them with subscriptions of various sizes and on-demand in HD or 4K resolution.
You earn a 35% commission per video download, meaning you get between $2.80 and $7.84 for subscription downloads and between $22.40 and $70.00 per on-demand download.
Buyer’s Plan
Earnings per download
25 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$7.84 / $5.60
40 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$5.25 / $4.20
350 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$4.55 / $3.85
750 credits per month (Monthly / Annual subscriber)
$3.50 / $2.80
HD – 16–500 credit pack or on-demand
$22.40 to $28.00
4K – Subscription, 40–500 credit pack or on-demand
$56.00 to $70.00
Bonus Program for additional earnings
If you’re an active and successful contributor, you can get free access to Adobe Creative Cloud assets through Adobe Stock Contributor Bonus Program.
150–4,999 downloads: You can choose a one-year plan of either Creative Cloud Photography (20GB), Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, or After Effects.
5,000+ downloads: One-year access to Creative Cloud All Apps
Each image counts as one download and each video as eight downloads. The downloads only count within a calendar year, so between January 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022. For now, only downloads of photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos qualify for the download count.
How do I get paid?
You can get paid once you’ve received at least $25 in royalties. You must also meet the following criteria:
It has been at least 45 days since your first sale.
You have a valid tax form in your account.
You have a valid PayPal, Payoneer, or Skrill account.
Paypal vs. Payoneer vs. Skrill
Adobe Stock’s payout system is not easy to understand. Here’s everything you need to know:
Payoneer is available only for non-US contributors who receive payments in US dollars. This includes South America, South Korea, South Africa, Australia, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. It also includes everyone who created their account after February 18, 2020.
Contributors from Japan need a Premium PayPal account.
Contributors from Indonesia, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey need a Payoneer account.
Contributors from Russia and Belarus
Because of the sanction imposed by the US, contributors from Russia and Belarus may not receive the payments. This has nothing to do with Adobe but depends fully on 3rd party payment providers, who may not be allowed to work with your bank.
If your payment is not processed within 2 weeks, Adobe will return the funds to your Adobe Stock Contributor account, so you can withdraw them in the future.
Free Collection Payment
When you upload an asset, you may nominate it, meaning you are contributing it to the free collection instead of the paying one. If and when Adobe accepts it, the asset will be added to Adobe’s free collection, which currently holds 776K files.
However, you don’t get paid in cash for the works downloaded from the free collection. Instead, you get a single payment of 5 credits for each work accepted and added to the free collection. Credits are then converted to your currency with the following conversion rates: 1 credit = 1 USD = 1 Euro = 0.75 GPB = 7.10 SEK = 4 PLN = 150 Yen.
How to become an Adobe Stock contributor?
Create your contributor account
Go to contributor.stock.adobe.com and sign in with your Adobe ID (your Adobe account). If you don’t yet have an Adobe account, sign up first. For Fotolia users, you can sync your accounts via the Contributor portal.
Upload content
Accept all the Legal guidelines Adobe throws at you. Also, you need to be at least 18 years old and be the rightful owner of all the content you upload.
Add a title, description, etc.
Every piece of content you upload to Adobe Stock Contributor needs to have a title, a category assigned to it, and keywords that best describe it. If your ima
Submit images
Your content is now ready to be reviewed. A team of Adobe Stock curators will check all your content for technical quality and value.
Manage your content
You can add more or remove your content at any time. I also encourage you to edit and update descriptions and titles to make them more alluring regularly.
Wait to sell your first piece of content. It might take a while at first, but the earnings will start snowballing once it starts going.
How to upload images?
To upload images as a contributor, you need to create an account first. Then, click onSellin the top right corner and upload images or videos with an FTP upload.
When the images upload, you’ll need to add a title, description, category, and keywords, for which Adobe Stock automatically provides suggestions. Importantly, you must attach a valid Property or Model release for your photos that depict a property or a person.
When you’re done, click Submit, and Adobe’s curating team will check your photos for technical and artistic issues, which takes around 1-3 days. When your images get approved, they automatically show in search, and you can start earning money.
Adobe Stock Contributor program also daily updates your sales to keep you up-to-date with your earnings.
Guidelines for photos
Adobe Stock doesn’t mind whether you’re a professional photographer with a $5k camera or an amateur with a mobile device. Photos must meet the following requirements:
Technical requirements
Format: JPEG
Colour space: sRGB
Minimum image resolution: 4 MP (megapixels)
Maximum image resolution: 100 MP (megapixels)
Maximum file size: 45 MB (megabytes)
No watermarks or timestamps
Do not artificially increase image size
Quality standards
If you want your images to be valuable to customers, they need to reach specific quality standards.
Make sure that they are:
Properly exposed and well-lit,
Without visible noise, dust specks, or water drops,
Perfectly-composed (for beginners: Rule of thirds)
Not over-edited
Title and keywords
Title and keyword are how potential customers find your images and videos. Therefore, you must find descriptive titles and keywords.
A common mistake I noticed a lot among beginners is that they want to be poetic.
Adobe Sensei can be a great help here. It helps you by suggesting up to 25 keywords and a title for you automatically. In addition, it leverages artificial intelligence to analyze the content of your image and compare it to similar best-performing images.
Don’t spam
Adobe Stock considers spam as uploading multiple variations of the same scenery with only minor differences between them. The same applies to different postproduction effects,depth of field, and angles.
Spamming can get your Adobe Stock Contributor account temporarily blocked or even permanently banned.
Pay attention to legal issues
Is the model in your photos recognizable? Is the property in your photos recognizable? Then you need a model or property release, respectively. These contracts specify that the model or the property owner allows the use of the photos for commercial intents.
In addition, Adobe Stock won’t accept any files that contain company or brand names, logos, or trademarks. However, you may upload content where these have been removed.Read more about it.
How To Earn More With Adobe Stock?
A friend of mine struggled to sell stock photos. Following my advice, he earned 20% more at the end of the month and 3.1x more shortly afterward. And his investment paid off in only six weeks. Pretty good, don’t you think?
1. Get premium photo editing software.
Professionally edited stock photos are the only way to succeed at Adobe Stock due to their high-quality standards. Sure, almost every app can edit photos, but not all of them areeasy to use. You want a photo editor that gives you full control over post-processing. I recommend Lightroom for intermediate users and Luminar AI for beginners.
2. Improve your post-processing.
It doesn’t matter which photo editing software you get if you don’t know how to use it. So I recommend you learn the basics of photo editing. The best way to do that is to buy the software first, then follow through. You’ll pick it up in no time.
3. Use professional Lightroom presets.
The Lightroom presets allow you to edit photos quickly and efficiently. What I love the most is the ability to try tens of edits simply by hovering over thepresets. It allows me to find the best edit for any photo quickly. Next, I make minor tweaksif necessary. The best presets available right now come with a bundle discount.
There are more options to earn money with photography. Find more about them in my guide on selling photos online.
Want To Increase Adobe Stock Earnings?
Lightroom and Photoshop are the two favorite tools of professional stock photographers, especially when it comes to Adobe Stock.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How to delete the Adobe Stock Contributor account?
Being Adobe Stock Contributor doesn’t cost you anything, so think twice whether it’s worth deleting your account. Navigate to the bottom of the Adobe Stock Contributor Portal and send a request via a contact form.
How much do Adobe Stock Contributors make?
As an Adobe Stock Contributor, you can expect to earn anywhere between $0.33/photo and up to $70 per uploaded video. Some contributors that upload daily make thousands of dollars per month.
How to start selling images and videos on Adobe Stock Contributor?
Create a new Adobe account and sign in with your Adobe ID. Upload photos (or videos), add description, title, and keywords, and submit the content to be reviewed. Once it’s accepted, you’ll start making money for each piece of content sold.
Do I keep remain the owner of the content?
You are only selling the right to use your images, for which you earn money in the form of commissions. You still retain full ownership of your content.
Matic Broz is a photographer, graphic designer, and stock photographer. For over ten years he's been helping photographers improve their photos and graphic designers find the best images for their designs. His work has been featured by Lifewire, Skylum, and PetaPixel. In his free time, he enjoys photography, hiking, and petting random dogs. Read more
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Adobe Stock pays you a percentage whenever one of your assets gets downloaded. You get a 33% commission for images, and for videos, you receive 35%. Since the cost depends on the type of asset, the type of license, and the subscription or pack, the user has – your earning will depend on that too.
Making money with Adobe Stock is a great way to supplement your income and build a portfolio of creative work. With Adobe Stock, you can upload your photos, illustrations, videos, and other creative content to the platform and make money when customers purchase your work.
With a comprehensive royalty-free license (one of the few with unlimited legal protection) and a variety of pricing plans, Adobe Stock is the best choice for anyone who needs stock photos. You can use them for personal or commercial projects and resale (in which case you'll need an extended license).
Credits will be deposited to your applicable Adobe Stock contributor account within 30 days after the start of each Free Period, with credits converting according to the currency associated with that account, as described at helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/getting-paid.html.
Adobe says the photos that use models tend to be more popular than people-free photos, but images that incorporate cultural diversity, technology, fashion, food, portraiture, lifestyle, architecture, beauty and business are also popular sellers.
1. Alamy. With over 60 million images, Alamy is the largest stock photo website, but they also pay well too. Photographers earn 50% of every sale, and aren't restricted to selling exclusively with Alamy.
For on-demand buying, Adobe Stock wins in flexibility and per-image rates. Shutterstock offers a simpler buying method, though. For subscriptions, Shutterstock is a clear winner in terms of the lowest prices and high-volume plans. Adobe Stock has more multimedia download options.
If we talk about the Adobe stock price prediction 2025, then according to our analysis, the average price of the stock in the year 2025 can be $520 and the maximum price can be $580.
You invest in Adobe through your talent and hard work. Our equity programs and employee stock purchase plan help you invest in the company financially as well—and to reap the rewards of that investment.
With Portfolio—which comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud plan—you can quickly and simply build a website to showcase your creative work, so you can get back to doing what you do best.
We review annual salary increases to ensure fairness, incorporating new acquisitions into our pay review cycles. We have also moved to a bi-annual promotion cycle to increase fairness and transparency for opportunities within Adobe.
Adobe has some of the most well-known and used creative software in the world. This makes them highly selective in who they choose to employ. All positions at Adobe require candidates to have either relevant education or professional experience.
The best time to take a photo that sells is at dawn or dusk. Midday shots, studio shots, and harsh light simply don't sell as well. We've had major buyers—we're talking companies that are buying hundreds of images at a time—specifically ask for only dawn or dusk photos.
If you already travel a lot and you take high-quality photos of places that aren't overly captured already, odds are you'll make a sale. I know a few different people who've been able to get their stock photo income up to $200-$300 a year without too much of a headache.
On average, stock photographers make $0.02 per image per month with stock photos, while professionals make $0.05–$0.25 per image per month. Royalty-free sales earn between $0.10 and $99.50, while extended licenses bring up to $500.
Stock photography won't make you rich either. Many stock photographers do earn thousands of dollars per year from stock photography, with a lucky few clearing tens of thousands. But relatively few earn enough to quit their day jobs — although, for many, those “day jobs” are other photography gigs.
Adobe generates most of its revenue from subscriptions. The subscription business consists of digital media, digital experiences, and publishing & advertising. Indeed, in 2022, Adobe generated $12.38 billion in digital media, $3.88 billion in digital experiences, and $123 million from publishing & advertising.
Adobe Stock is one of the biggest and best-paying microstock photography platforms out there. It's a great platform for selling photos and making some extra money. To increase your chances of making sales on Adobe Stock you need to: consider making people and lifestyle images.
When you submit your content to Shutterstock, you allow us to license it on your behalf, but you always retain the copyright to your work. This means that regardless of the number of downloads you attain with your Shutterstock portfolio, you are free to display and sell that work on any other site.
By the end of June 2023, we expect that the Adobe stock will reach a maximum price of $472.00 per share. Due to this, our Adobe stock price prediction for 2023 estimates that the ADBE stock could reach $430.10 by the end of the year – a 40% rise from today's level.
Future price of the stock is predicted at 858.53689737124$ (97.467% ) after a year according to our prediction system. This means that if you invested $100 now, your current investment may be worth 197.467$ on 2024 June 05, Wednesday.
For each $1 you add as pretax or Roth after-tax contributions to your 401(k), Adobe will contribute 50 cents, up to 6% of your eligible pay, each pay period. If you contribute more than 6% of your pay, Adobe matches 3% of your annual compensation, up to the IRS-eligible annual compensation maximum of $330,000.
Adobe is the No.1 organization with the happiest employees in 2021 as per the new report published by Comparably, a company review site. 70,000 U.S. firms were part of the study. The report identified where employees are most satisfied with attributes such as work environment, company goals, pay and other benefits.
Adobe Inc., breaking ranks with an industry cutting costs and laying off workers, has opened a new office tower in its home city, adding new capacity for staff and pledging no companywide job cuts in 2023.
All Adobe Stock licenses are perpetual, so you may use them as many times as you need in your project, anywhere in the world, subject to the license restrictions. This means that even if you cancel your account, you may still use the licensed asset in your project.
The all-time high Adobe stock closing price was 688.37 on November 19, 2021. The Adobe 52-week high stock price is 451.15, which is 7.8% above the current share price. The Adobe 52-week low stock price is 274.73, which is 34.3% below the current share price.
Get 10 Adobe Stock standard assets during your 30-day free trial. You won't be charged until after your trial ends, when pricing will be US$29.99/month plus applicable taxes for the duration of your annual plan (10 assets a month) Cancel risk-free before your trial ends.
If you have high-quality photos, videos, or vector content, and you own all the rights, you can sign up to become an Adobe Stock artist with your Adobe ID and start uploading. It's free!
The 29 analysts offering 12-month price forecasts for Adobe Inc have a median target of 400.00, with a high estimate of 480.00 and a low estimate of 321.00. The median estimate represents a -3.72% decrease from the last price of 415.45.
How much does Adobe Stock pay? Adobe Stock pays 33% commission for images (photos, vectors, and illustrations) and 35% for videos. This equates to $0.33 to $26.40 per image download and $2.80 to $70.00 per video download.
Adobe Express month-to-month plans earn you 85.00% of one month subscription fee. Adobe Express Annual Plan earn you 8.33% of one year subscription fee.
You cannot sell your photos directly from the platform. That's a problem for a lot of photographers. Selling prints is still popular to make some extra money. If this is the case for you, then Adobe Portfolio might not be for you.
That said, Adobe Portfolio is not an e-commerce platform per se. It gives you no direct access to code. To sell your own photos, you'll need to procure a 3rd party shopping cart. Create a custom link page or button in Portfolio that contains an external link to your shopping cart site.
How much does Adobe Stock cost? Adobe Stock costs between $0.26 and $9.99 for images, between $7.99 and $199.80 for videos, and between $0.26 and $9.99 for music. Subscriptions cost from $29.99 to $249.99 per month.
Both offer the images in a royalty-free license. For on-demand buying, Adobe Stock wins in flexibility and per-image rates. Shutterstock offers a simpler buying method, though.
The median price for a stock photo is $1.11, with an average range of $1.00 to $1.50. However, pricing can vary greatly depending on the purchasing method and quality. On-demand or premium stock photos cost more, while photos obtained through subscriptions are more affordable.
The bottom line. The main difference between Shutterstock and Getty Images is the price. As a more affordable stock photo site, Shutterstock sells stock images for $0.22, while Getty Images' prices range from $50 to $499/image. Another difference is the number of images offered by Shutterstock (440 million) vs.
You earn between 15% and 40% commission when one of your images or videos is downloaded at Shutterstock. This means you get paid $0.10 to $5.80 for images, $10.20 to $39.80 for extended licenses, and $1.25 to $47.92 for each video.
Adobe portfolio is a great choice for beginners or for semi-professional photographers to create their photography portfolio. Even pros could see huge advantages in using Adobe Portfolio because of the Lightroom integration.
Introduction: My name is Eusebia Nader, I am a encouraging, brainy, lively, nice, famous, healthy, clever person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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