Recently, we translated Cutcaster into 15 different languages. While it was a large undertaking, translating the site, a lot of the words we had originally used on the English version of Cutcaster lost their meaning when translated into different languages. Some of our translations don’t sound right or lack professionalism when read by someone living or from that country. We are asking for your help. If one of the languages below is your “mother tongue” and you would like to earn a little extra money for a few hours of work checking and correctly our pre-translated versions of the site, we would love to speak with you about this project.
We can provide you with an excel sheet with the short snippets of English and pre-translated text which needs to be checked and corrected if needed. We also can provide you immediate help if you have any questions.
Most phrases that need to have their pre-existing translations examined and in some cases corrected are 1 to 6 words long. There are around 500 phrases that need to be checked.
Danish
Korean
Greek
Dutch
Russian
French
Norwegian
German
Italian
Polish
Swedish
Czech
Japan
Portugese
Chinese
If you are interested, please let your contact info below and the language you can help with or email us at webmaster@cutcaster.com.
Many thanks,
FTP is now enabled and ready for uploading. Still use uploads.cutcaster.com as the host and use the email you have registered with Cutcaster to login and then enter your Cutcaster password. Now you can upload and transfer the files to our site from your favorite FTP client. Your files will be automatically processed and added to the submit page. We hope you like the changes and let us know your feedback below or if you have trouble by sending us an email at webmaster@cutcaster.com.
Today, Cutcaster re-launched with several upgrades that address growing needs in the stock image marketplace for both image buyers and sellers.
We wanted to make changes that would translate to real improvement for all our users. Our search engine now helps buyers find, filter and download relevant images more quickly, and we’ve made it easier for our contributors to sell their images and earn good money doing it.
We’ve now combined an easy-to-use search interface with a highly accurate contextual search engine that disambiguates word meanings. As the user types in keywords, the engine determines their meaning and the intention of the searcher to provide more accurate image results. As the searcher applies additional filters—for number of people, orientation or dominant color, for example— search results are updated immediately, making it easy to focus and expand results as necessary. If a keyword has multiple meanings, a user will be able to select their meaning by clicking on the keyword to choose the right meaning. We do all the rest.
The checkout process has been improved as well with simplified pricing, shown in credits and dollars, and the introduction of PayPal. Our goal was to make downloading images as seamless as possible for people. Users don’t even have to register to buy, and now they have even more secure payment options.
For its contributors, Cutcaster has increased its royalty payments to one of the highest rates in the industry. Our rate are going from 50% to 55%. We want to continue offering excellent images from great contributors, and our rates help us attract and choose the best. At a time when other sites are reducing their royalty percentages and payouts, we’re increasing them.
A greatly simplified user interface facilitates how contributors upload their images and view their image stats. We will have the FTP upload option enabled again after next week but you can upload images now via the upload area in your account. The whole site is optimized for our sellers now. There’s no guesswork, from signing up to providing the right tax forms, to getting paid.
We hope you enjoy all the improvements and we welcome your feedback.
Our FTP upload option will be closed down for all contributors over the next two weeks to give our reviewers a much needed break and give our programmers a chance to move over all the files over to the new site. We are sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause and ask for your patience. The new upload system will include both of the ways to upload to Cutcaster that we have now as well as a new flash upload system that will make uploading to the site even easier. In the meantime, we ask any contributors that you submit all files that are in the edit and describe area before Sept. 1st in order for us to transfer over those files to the new database.
Is summer almost over? Wow, the last three months have been a blur of hard work, taking stabs at solving very difficult problems and thinking about how we could improve our whole site experience. Our main goal was to ensure that the first page of images we displayed in front of any buyer on any given search, would contain the one they couldn’t leave the site without.
A few updates. We’re just adding the final touches to the new homepage design, the new account dashboard and the new picture finder we built. We still have a lot of testing but things are looking great AND on track for an end of August release. Our search page interface is one of the simplest to use and let’s searchers find perfectly matched picture results even when the keyword they used to search might have more than one meaning i.e. bar (Drinks) or bar (Metal). It’s a smart blend of some complex search engine filtering and using words to give meaning to other words to find the most accurate images for that search.
Our new pricing system will move us closer to a credit system. However buyers will still get the option to purchase single downloads via a credit card if they want. The credit system is just easier for most buyers today to understand and will allow us to offer the site in multiple currencies to attract new buyers. Also the changes should help keep the costs down from all the tiny micropayment transactions, return a higher percentage of royalties to you and let you know exactly what you will be earning from your daily sales.
Royalties for exclusive content uploaded after Sept. 1 is moving up from 50% to 55% of the sale. Non-exclusive content will stay at 40% like before. Payouts will still be made at $25 when it is reached. We need more exclusive images and illustrations and we want to pay you for it. If you are interested in partnering up with Cutcaster to represent your collection on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis, please reach out to us via creativedirector@cutcaster.com or register a sellers account here.
Over the next month, we plan to roll out a number of exciting new image search features and design changes at Cutcaster that will drastically improve your experience when buying and selling images. This entire spring and summer, we have worked hard planning, re-designing and testing the new website’s features and infrastructure to make sure it is a product we are proud to release and you are happy to use.
Pull out the surgeon’s knife because five pages at the current Cutcaster are getting a major facelift. The search page, product page, checkout area, account page and, lastly, the homepage. This is an effort to simplify navigation around the site, shorten the amount of clicks from search to checkout and re-organize our message around the site so we can prepare the site for translation into multiple languages.
New features will include a completely overhauled search engine that automatically identifies the meaning behind a keyword used in search to drill down to the most relevant content, more options at checkout for downloading images and a simplified pricing system to give buyers even better discounts when buying repeatedly at Cutcaster. Also be on the lookout for a visual search engine that is in the works. More details to come later but all the changes are really sweet and will be a major time saver.
We hope you will enjoy the new release over the coming months and have a great rest of the summer.
Your Cutcaster team.
In the last year, Cutcaster has seen an incredible improvement in the quality of photos and vector artwork, which are uploaded to the site. The quality bar keeps getting raised as we reach 1 million images at Cutcaster in the coming months. With that said, we still see gaps in our collection that have created massive opportunities. Find out here about what type of images we are actively looking for and are under-represented at Cutcaster. Fill these holes and you might find yourself with a hot seller.
To expand your portfolio into an untapped arena of stock photography, we urge you to create a portion of your portfolio that really shows your “outside of the box” thinking, i.e. get granddad out there on water-skis, or place your old credit cards in your kitchen’s blender or use Photoshop to create unique situations in your images by combining different elements. Get as creative as possible. Take chances and see what works and doesn’t work. Then carefully keyword and upload your new creative shots to Cutcaster.
Here are some examples of pictures we currently have but we’d love to see more of this type of photography and illustrations:
We strive to provide our picture buyers with the unique images they seek. Thanks for your help creating more jaw dropping images that will impress our buyers and increase your long-term earnings potential!
Regards,
Your Cutcaster team.
The new Cutcaster is rocking and rolling. Traffic and sales are improving each day and the reviews from our customers and contributors have been outstanding. Shortly, we’ll begin our first real advertising and marketing campaigns for the new site. Are you ready to take advantage of this opportunity?
Upload your newest artwork to attract the attention of picture buyers who are searching now at Cutcaster. Uploading new content, as often as possible, is the best way to get higher placement in our search results as well. Learn from this short uploading video how to upload multiple pictures at once via our new FTP system.
Want to know a great way to get more sales and impress visitors that land on your portfolio page? Organize niche sets of your images with our newly released Lightboxes. We’ve seen that creating lightboxes has led to an increase in views and sales for images included within them. Why not create your first lightbox now to see how it works? This short lightbox video shows you how easy they are to create.
Are you telling your friends and colleagues about Cutcaster and using your referral codes so you get earn easy cash at the same time? See how to add a referral link to your webpage, blog or forum signature that points to your portfolio and gives you cash when new users signup.
If we aren’t already connected on our Facebook page and Twitter page, please take a moment to connect with us.
Your Cutcaster Team.
Here are two very short videos to help you understand how the new lightbox system works. We have a few more tweaks to make to the feature but the first video shows you how you should be
creating a new image lightbox and then second video shows you how you can add an image to a photo lightbox.
We will be releasing shortly the ability to delete lightboxes, set them to public vs private and also the ability to easily send them via the site instead of copying and pasting the URL into an email to someone. Hope these help and please pass along your feedback regarding the lightbox functionality.
Hang out with us!