I am Starting to Sell AI Images.

Considering the experience of others

Many people on Medium are talking about uploading AI images to Adobe Stock, and well… It’s safe. I want to try.

It’s a bit time-consuming depending on how well you organize your work, and some people had very little results, so I was debating a lot if I should give it a try, but here I am.

My process

I am not ready to spend any money on this business as of now; I might do it in the future to outsource some work if I can earn any significant income from it. But for now, I am doing everything with free services.

For image generation, I am using Leonardo AI, for the upscaling, I am using Upscayl.

Then, I upload it in batches to Adobe Stock and do tagging manually.

My first uploads

I was happily surprised that my uploads were reviewed in less than 1 week!

Adobe says their review process might take up to 8 weeks, so I was preparing to just keep uploading as much as I can and then wait 8 weeks.

The first thing I learned was that they do not like much light.

I created many pictures of computer CPUs as I think that AI is pretty good at creating those. There are many lights and strong colors, but all of them got rejected.

For my first batch upload, I uploaded 50 images, 29 were rejected (the CPU images), three got accepted, and 18 disappeared.

For my next upload, I prepared 100 pictures. So far, they are still in review.

Unfortunately, after uploading, I read that Adobe Stock doesn’t like using similar images too often.

My recent upload includes a lot of the same objects, just different angles. I hope my account won’t get banned. We will see and hope…

How long does it usually take?

I heard many people saying that it takes some time to prepare and that the process is quite repetitive. I still have many things I can optimize as I am not yet utilizing AI.

Creating, tagging, and uploading 100 pictures takes me two hours.

The only part that is perfectly optimized is the upscaling of images. I am preparing prompts for the image generation without AI, and also, the titles/keywords are only made with Adobe Stock’s built-in AI.

What do I expect?

I am not expecting too much. Honestly.

I have seen some people failing, but the fact that there are not many YouTube videos about this topic out there gives me hope that the market is not yet saturated.

Some people have less than 1000 images online and can still make more than $100 per month.

Therefore, I will add at least 1000 images to my portfolio.

(Of course, I am talking about 1000 accepted images here :) )

2025

There will be more people discovering this side hustle, but there will also be more people giving up on this.

I am still at the beginning of this business, but I have already noticed that it’s not that exciting. Creating images is more fun, but tagging them is quite boring.

Also, you don’t see immediate results. It might take months to get your first sale.

Nevertheless, this business is something anyone can do. I don’t have any crazy amount of RAM; I even created the AI images on my phone when I wasn’t home.

Creating your pictures is a better investment in yourself than scrolling on social media for endless hours each week!

We will see where this journey goes!