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.

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.

Using our search engine is so easy that it doesn’t need instructions. However we wanted to add some tips and tricks that will get you searching like a professional no matter who you are. It’s finally time to spend less time searching and more time creating.

In addition, we created a new feature just for our image buyers. It’s called “Grouping” and allows you to instantly see if there are more similar images like a particular one you like in a search results page.

Cutcaster is getting a much needed upgrade to our search platform, database and virtual servers.  Over the next two weeks, we will be testing out Solr which we will be adding to our database  in order to speed up the Cutcaster site in general. If you don’t know Solr, you can read more about it at lucene.apache.org/solr/

From the Solr website,

“Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world’s largest internet sites.”

Favor to ask of our community.

We will be doing some bug testing over the next week and would love anyone in our Cutcaster community who could help us beta test some of the new functionality and search.  If you are interested please email webmaster@cutcaster.com and let us know that you want to participate. As a thank you we will add 15 credits to your account.

We will be updating the blog if there will be any downtime and when it is released to the live site. This is a much needed improvement to the site and will have a great impact on our future growth and success. The way we had the site structured before was fine for the early stage of growth we were in but now with more files being uploaded to the site and more people visiting each day, we needed something to improve the overall user experience by speeding things up.

Can’t wait to share the upgrades.

Try a search at the site and  you will see stacks of images served up to you. When you select one of the image thumbnails, a cluster of similar images will pop up.  What do you think of the new tool? Will it help photo buyers find the right image faster? Is it a better way to display image search results?
Obviously after a few test you can see there are only a few search queries updated to the testing tool. I tried to do a search for “stock photos” and it wouldn’t let me. I also did a few other ones and got some funky results but some impressive ones as well. You can decide for yourself what you think.

There is a write up with more details at:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent er/article/182384/new_result_clusters_ swirl_into_ googles_image_search.html

We just released another new tweak that photo buyers, image researchers and those looking to license vector files will hopefully like and use.

Filename search is functional on live. You can now search by watermark filename (which is what you get if you drag & drop the comp onto your desktop), and by the comp filename (if you click on download comp button). These should help photo buyers find the perfect image and illustrations faster at Cutcaster. Let us know what you think.

The Cutcaster Team