Woman singing i
<div style=do my essay

nto a retro microphone” width=”224″ height=”300″ />Cutcaster.com, one of the internet’s premier sources of high quality, royalty-free stock images, announced a major milestone as its image collection surpassed 1,000,000 photographs, illustrations, and vector art.

“Everyone’s proud of the recent milestone,” says John Griffin, CEO of Cutcaster. “We weren’t the first or the fastest to a million but from the start we stressed quality over quantity and that guided our image growth strategy. Cutcaster is about providing world-class images to our customers and that will remain our top priority.”

The one-millionth image was submitted by Serbian photographer, iMarin, of a woman singing into a retro microphone. “I have been selling stock since 2006 and uploaded my photos to Cutcaster because of their high commission rates for sellers and their low $25 payout request for getting my earnings,” iMarin explained.

With a global customer base spanning many different industries including publishing, advertising, web design, blogging and product design, it’s crucial that Cutcaster provides images suited to a wide variety of applications as well as innovative solutions to meet their customers image needs. Image buyers have nearly limitless creative options when using Cutcaster images, which are provided under a royalty-free license with the option to purchase additional extended rights.

“Due to the smaller budgets, we are seeing an increased demand for affordable, premium royalty-free images,” Griffin noted. “As a result, Cutcaster is directly addressing the changing needs of the marketplace by providing an expansive selection of high-quality stock images via an affordable, user-friendly licensing model.”

The company attributes its tremendous growth to its innovative business model, which harnesses the power of talented photographers and illustrators worldwide, who regularly upload their work to Cutcaster’s website. Over the last 6 months, Cutcaster’s library has been adding 20,000 new images per week or nearly two images every minute. Cutcaster’s expert review team screens every image for quality and compliance, enforcing some of the strictest standards in the imagery business. “Two out of every three images submitted by approved artists are now accepted at Cutcaster,” Cora Reed, the companies creative director noted.

“The photos I find at Cutcaster feel authentic and work perfectly within my layouts and budget,” says Mike Armenta of Taylor Stitch in San Francisco, who uses Cutcaster’s affordable images to make the newsletters he creates more appealing. “The website is simple to use, has fast search and great customer service.”

Earlier this year, the company introduced the commercially available search engine, SpiralSearch that was custom built using a unique controlled vocabulary and faceted search. SpiralSearch is just one of the many features of “Spiral” which is their custom framework used to build Cutcaster. Today, customers can find great stock images faster, more easily and with precision using the Spiral framework.

Cutcaster was founded in 2007 and has grown into one of the internet’s largest pay-as-you-go and credit-based stock image agencies. The company crowdsources the talent of more than 30,000 digital photographers and illustrators from around the globe who collect earnings each time a customer downloads their images.

Share
 

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. We have the images you need for your last minute projects, (news) letters of love, blog posts, and to freshen up your website!

 

Find all the above images by clicking on the links below.

 

http://cutcaster.com/photo/901326756-Grungy-Tulips/

http://cutcaster.com/photo/100740710-Toddler-in-a-Fairy-Outfit/

http://cutcaster.com/photo/901392325-Happy-valentine-s-day/

http://cutcaster.com/vector/901376196-Grunge-Valentines-day-card/

http://cutcaster.com/photo/100313572-Vintage-Valentine-hearts/

http://cutcaster.com/photo/800999118-Fantasy-happy-winter-couple-blowing-a-christmas-wish/

http://cutcaster.com/photo/100041829-Water-Heart/#S126328

http://cutcaster.com/photo/100464494-Disgruntled-Cupid/#S126328

http://cutcaster.com/photo/100162042-Heart-cake/#S126328

Share
 

If you have not heard yet, recently we released Cutcaster’s simple to use API that lets developers and small businesses quickly integrate a diverse database of images into their business models and workflows. Using our API is very simple and it is well documented.

If your business, website, online tool or product needs millions of high quality photos and vectors, Cutcaster wants to team up so you can integrate our stock photography library into your business. At the same time, you can work with our experienced business development team to determine the best path for achieving your business goals using the Cutcaster’s API.

To learn more about our powerful APIs, visit our Developers area or you can request additional documentation by emailing webmaster@cutcaster.com.

Share
 

Want an easy way to make more money and be the first to share with your friends and colleagues a great website for finding the perfect images or illustrations? Kill two birds with one stone by adding the banners to your website, blog or social network sites in order to refer new members to Cutcaster and get paid. The banners are automatically linked with your unique referral ID and you just need to cut and paste the code into your website. See the details below and check out the new referral page to download your unique referral banners and graphics.

Create a referral link

Add a referral link to your blog, or include it in an email or any other online communication.
Users who come to Cutcaster through your link and complete a transaction, regardless of if they sign up or not, will automatically be credited to your referral account. (Note: Users must have their cookies enabled for the referral to be credited to you.)

To create a link, add a forward slash (/) to the end of any Cutcaster URL, and then add your referral code, shown below:

Let’s say for our example the referral test code is: #R874219924

Examples:

To share Cutcaster’s homepage: http://www.cutcaster.com/#R874219924
To share your Studio page: http://www.cutcaster.com/search/portfolio/874219924/

This will ensure that any users who click through from that link and make a purchase or sell an image through Cutcaster you will get a percentage of that royalty payment we collect. The referred user needs to have their cookies enabled and sign up or checkout within 30 days of clicking on your link.

Get paid

You can request a payout at any time after your account balance (unpaid accrued earnings) reaches $25. Payments are made via PayPal or by check.

Click the following link to sign up for Cutcaster’s referral program and get your banners today.

Click on the below graphics to see the entire banner.

 

Share
 

From the team at Cutcaster, we wanted to wish all our members, friends and supporters out there a happy and safe holiday season. Thanks to you, who helped support and grow Cutcaster with all of your hard work and emails of encouragement in the last year. We wouldn’t be here without you. 2012 is sure to be another impressive year of growth and success for our entire community and company. We’re blessed as a company to have this opportunity to serve you and let’s kick some ass together in the New Years.

Happy Holidays and New Year from Cutcaster

Share
 

Everyone knows the holidays can be some of the best times of the year to give and hopefully receive!! Spread the love with this holiday season with images from Cutcaster.com‘s. Find high quality, beautiful Christmas photos that are perfect for an office flyer, e-cards for your client, or your holiday emails. At Cutcaster, you will find the perfect image for all the December holidays for just a few dollars!

Best wishes for the holiday season! Find the above holiday images at Cutcaster.

Magic gift box

Christmas holiday woman with snow

Beautiful gold Christmas tree background

Santa Claus robot juggler

Present decorated with Christmas decoration

Woman holding a gift

Motorized Santa Claus

Christmas note

Red Shoes

Share
 

It’s been a while since we have put out an image request update but lately, a number of image buyers have been downloading and asking us for more images of elderly people, seniors and grandparents doing everyday things. The range of activities that these mature adults could be doing include working out, dating, eating, playing with younger kids, routine medical check-ups or any type of activity that takes place on a normal day. To give you an idea for what types of images we have of elderly people doing everyday things take a look at these elderly people photo lightboxes. We thank you for your support and uploads.

To download any of the images above please visit Cutcaster.com or the seniors lightbox page which has over 200 high quality images of older people doing everyday things.

Share
 

Glorious Aerial Sunset

Cutcaster is almost to 1,000,000 new photos and vectors.

We want to celebrate this huge milestone by giving you up to 49% off any image download when you use Cutcaster credits but you have to act quickly. This offer is only valid now until we hit 1 million images so lock in the savings by purchasing a credit package at Cutcaster. See the savings.

Share
 

Seo-red-arrows-Search-engine-optimization-webJust because you run a photo blog it doesn’t mean you don’t need search engine optimization (SEO). Some bloggers make the mistake of thinking you can only optimize blogs with words, but that’s not true at all. In fact, there’s a lot you can do with your photo blog to make sure you get the maximum search engine benefit from your visual content. Here are some tips.

Name Your Photos

One of the first things you should do, before you even upload any photos to your blog, is make sure they have names that reflect what they are. If a photo is called DSCN2000 or PICT8500m, how are the search engines going to know what the photo shows? On the other hand, if you call your photo ‘Rhode-island-casino’ then there’s no mistake about what’s in the picture. It’s also helpful to resize your photos to the maximum size you want them to display before you upload them – this will help with page loading speed which search engines love. And when you get around to uploading your pics, then make use of ALT tags to provide additional information. Search engines love those too, and it’s also helpful for people with visual impairments who are using a screen reader or other accessibility device. Use the image name for the ALT tags and it will be obvious to every site visitor what your images show.

Titles and Links

What is your photo blog post about? Does the page title tell you? If it doesn’t, it should. Now, this doesn’t mean that you always have to be factual. Sometimes you may want to ask a question about a photo or link photos together in a theme. But generally, use a title that says what readers can expect to see. Titles are also important because they generate permalinks.

Read any advice on SEO, especially for WordPress blogs, and it will say that you should make your permalinks pretty. This is crucial. A permalink is the permanent link to your content on your blog and, just like the names of the pictures, these work better when they are short, sweet and descriptive. As we’ve said, blog software usually generates the permalink from the title, but you don’t have to use all the words in the title in your permalinks. Take out ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’ and the like and focus on the main words that people will use to search for your content. While you already know that keywords are important for written content, they are equally important for visual content to help people to find your stuff when they search.

To help yourself with SEO, consider using a plugin such as All in One SEO Pack, Platinum SEO, FLV Simpler SEO or the SEO features built into premium themes from a range of providers. These will encourage you to include optimized titles, keywords and descriptions for your images. This only takes a couple of extra minutes per post, and is totally worth it.

Use Tags and Categories for Better SEO

SEO is not just about search engines, but about helping users to find your content – the two go together. Clever use of categories and tags can help you achieve both aims. Think of category labels as ways of organizing large collections. For example, you might have photos of buildings, landscapes, people and art – each of those could be a category. Then you could tag individual photos by color scheme or location. If you have a travel photo blog, then perhaps you want to create categories for each continent, with sub-categories or tags for the different countries. If you’re writing about cruises, have categories or tags for the different cruise lines (Cunard, Royal Caribbean, P&O). You get the idea.

Do Some Writing

Just because you have a photo-blog, don’t ignore the search engine power of text. A couple of lines of description of the photo will give the search engines something additional to crawl and will provide an excerpt when people link to your content. And you need people to link to you, because that will also show that your site is relevant to others in its niche – and that’s also good for SEO.

And finally, post regularly and include a sitemap optimized for Google and other search engines. On WordPress blogs you can do this with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. This will ensure that all your content is crawled and you can sign up for a free account with Google Webmaster Tools so you can check on the progress of your SEO efforts.

We would like to thank Izzy A. Woods for her guest post on optimizing your images for search engines.

Share
 

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,

Share
© 2013 Web Design and Photography Highlights Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha