18 Months. 3 Billion photos edited.

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Tobias Peggs

18 months ago, we launched our SDK and announced the first 30 partners to integrate Aviary photo editing technology into their apps. Today, we’re pleased to announce that over 3,500 additional apps and services have joined their ranks, and their users have used Aviary to edit over 3 billion photos.

There’s no doubt that those numbers have surpassed our wildest expectations. In our first year, users edited 1 billion photos. In the past 6 months, they’ve edited 2 billion more. Our active monthly user count is now over 35 million people strong, and they have collectively spent 3,804 years editing photos with Aviary. This is how the past few months have looked:

Aviary 18 months 3bn Photos

There are a lot of global forces at play here: increased mobile bandwidth, smartphone penetration and higher quality smartphone cameras have all contributed to a dramatic increase in photo-based communications. Aviary provides simple-to-use but powerful tools to make those communications better. Our mission has always been to democratize creativity – to give everyday content creators the tools to express themselves fully. This mission still drives us everyday.

Our photo editing experience has now been incorporated into Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Walgreens and thousands more. Supporting ever more developer partners, and their users, remains our primary focus.

With that mind, we’re excited to invite developers to come hack with us! Aviary will be holding its Photo Hack Day #4 on April 6 – 7 at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park. Previous events have witnessed a total of more than 800 developers creating over 170 new apps, and we’ve been honored by keynotes and hack judging by luminaries like Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit, Hipmunk and Breadpig), David Karp (founder of Tumblr), Ben Huh (CEO of Cheezburger Network) and Lucas Buick (founder of Hipstamatic). PHD4 is shaping up to be another packed day of coding, creativity and inspiration, and we hope you’ll join us. Keep an eye on the website for more details as they emerge.

~ Tobias

Note: All numbers are exclusive of any Twitter data.

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5 Hot New Apps using Aviary for Photo Editing

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Archie

If you’re a developer, you should already know that we at Aviary strive to provide the best cross-platform photo editor SDK to power your already amazing applications. This week, we’re thrilled to highlight 5 awesome applications who have recently joined the Aviary Partner Network.

Kloudpics

By combining an intuitive UI with innovative design, Kloudpics created a truly unique social photo sharing experience. The app allows you to view and manage photos from all of your social networks, making it a powerful tool for shutterbugs on the go.

screen1screen2 screen3

Highlight: Aggregates your social feeds so you can view all of your content in one place.

Get Kloudpics for iOS.

Rocklive

Rocklive allows you to connect with your friends and fans via great features, including geo tagging and photo sharing. While Rocklive is a social network on it’s own, it also has tight integration with with other networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, giving you the best of many worlds.

Highlight: The ability to create video posts right from your phone.

Get Rocklive for iOS.

Moped

Moped is a unique mobile communications experience that focuses on private messaging. Moped integrates a handful of APIs in addition to ours, including Spotify’s, which allows users to playback shared tracks.

Highlight: Login using Twitter and make use of hashtags and @replies.

Get Moped for iOS & Android.

Fast Burst Camera

Great for capturing fast paced action, Fast Burst Camera is capable of taking 30 photos per second.

Highlight: Easily turn your quick snaps into animated GIFs.

Get Fast Burst Camera for Android.

Private Photo Vault

Private Photo Vault provides a wide range of functionality pertaining to the management and protection of its users’ media.

Highlight: Wireless photo transfers.

Get Private Photo Vault for iOS.

If you’re a developer building a cool new application that needs photo editing, grab our SDK and you might be featured in our next round up!

Posted in Android, Aviary, iOS, Partners | 1 Comment

Live Image Processing with getUserMedia() and Web Workers

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Conor Buckley


Demo of our internal tools using Web Workers & getUserMedia() to create image effects.

At Aviary, we are constantly exploring new technologies including the latest (and not-yet-fully supported) HTML5 features. Over the past few months, we’ve begun using Web Workers for a number of our internal tools. Web Workers allow us to perform heavy image processing tasks as a background process to avoid freezing the UI. We hope to be able to roll these benefits into our product in the near future while providing a fallback to unsupported browsers.

getUserMedia() is another exciting new feature in HTML5. It allows web applications to access video and audio from a user’s camera and other media device. In this demo, I’m piping webcam video data into a canvas element. I’ve also built a UI that allows me to control Aviary’s JavaScript Image Processors in real-time.

Since image processing is CPU intensive and can freeze our UI, we are also going to leverage the aforementioned Web Workers to perform the pixel manipulation as a background process. As I mentioned before, this will prevent the UI from freezing while the image is processing. No more need for the setTimeout( …, 0) trick.

Here’s how to get the video stream:

// create video element (attach to DOM if you’d like to
// view the stream but not necessary here)
var video = document.createElement('video');

// default to vendor prefixed method for getUserMedia
navigator.getUserMedia =
navigator.getUserMedia ||
navigator.webkitGetUserMedia ||
navigator.mozGetUserMedia ||
navigator.msGetUserMedia;

// acquire the video stream
navigator.getUserMedia({video:true}, function(stream){
    video.src = URL.createObjectURL(stream);
    video.play();

    // setup interval to getImageData every X seconds:
    setInterval(render, 10);
}, function(error){
    console.log('error', error);
});

In our render() method we first draw the video stream onto a canvas and use getImageData() for the pixels. Then we pass the pixels to our Web Worker for processing. (See example code link at bottom for more detail)

var render = function(){
    ctx.drawImage(video, 0, 0, w, h);
    var srcData = ctx.getImageData(0,0,w,h);

    // pass image data to web worker
    processor.postMessage({
        imageData: srcData
    });
};

After that, we use Web Workers to increase the Red channel, then use postMessage() to pass the resulting pixel data back.

// message receiver
onmessage = function(event) {
    var imageData = event.data.imageData,
    dst = imageData.data;

    /* Image Processing will go here */
    for (var i=0; i < dst.length; i += 4) {
        dst[i] += 70; // increase red channel
    }

    postMessage({
        dstData: imageData // pass result back
    });
};

Once the Worker is finished we will listen for the result and draw it onto our canvas:

processor.onmessage = function(event){
    ctxEffects.putImageData(event.data.dstData, 0, 0);
};

Check out the full example code and a working demo below.

Source: https://github.com/conorbuck/canvas-video-effects
Demo: http://conorbuck.github.com/canvas-video-effects/ (you’ll need the latest Chrome or Firefox)

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More Love in Aviary’s iOS Showcase App

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Mike Mignano
Love Effects

Love Effects

Today we’re adding more awesome Valentine’s Day-themed content to our iOS Showcase app: Love Effects. Last week we introduced a sticker pack that let users add hearts, candy, angel wings, and other fun VDAY images to their photos. Since its release, its been our most popular sticker pack, so we think users are going to love (no pun intended) the new Love effects just as much.

These effects play on red, pink, white and purple tones to bring out the romance in your photos. One of our favorites, the Heart effect desaturates your photo and adds a soft red hue throughout, while Vanilla adds pink and white light leaks that look great on brighter photos. The pack also features four more effects, appropriately named Bloom, Amethyst, Berry, and Passion. All six can be had for only $1.99.

So check them out and use them like crazy this Valentine’s Day. If you want to share your work with us, hit us up on Twitter.

Posted in Aviary, iOS, Mobile | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

‘Coveted’ for Tumblr Wins Best Use of Aviary’s SDK at Decoded Fashion Hackathon

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Ari

Last weekend, Aviary represented the photo front at the Decoded Fashion Hackathon in NYC. Attendance was outstanding, with a reported 300 developers and designers, 40% of which were women. A corporate-style hackathon with a twist, Decoded kicked off the event with an all-star panel of Fashion guru’s who talked about the real issues in the fashion world and the technology they’d like to see to solve them.

Fashion Panel

Fashion Panel: Rachel Roy, Farryn Weiner, Nathaniel Catanio, Kelly McCauly, Aliza Licht and Uri Minkoff

The panel expressed that a large chunk of the problems revolve around the supply chain. According to Uri Minkoff, CEO of Rebecca Minkoff, 80% of the problems in fashionrevolve around getting the right product on the floor at the right time. Miscommunications, shipping delays, botched samples and language barriers all contribute to an enormous loss in revenue and product that can’t be moved.

The panel also addressed a lack of industry standards for backend inventory management. According to them, the typical designer will work with spreadsheets, while the more tech savvy will shoehorn generic project management tools into their process. They expressed a strong desire for a more targeted solution.

DesignGym_editedOver the course of the next 24 hours, developers and designers, with the help of business savvy mentors, sought to find solutions to many of these problems. When Sunday afternoon rolled around, there were a total of 78 hacks, 32 of which earned to opportunity to present in front of the two panels of judges.

Submitted app categories included: Consumer Sentiment Analysis tools for businesses and designers, Fashion Discovery tools for consumers, Inventory Management tools, and Brick and Mortar Engagement tools.

In the end, there were five finalists.  Each will be spending the next two weeks improving and polishing their apps under mentorship from Gilt founder Kevin Ryan. On Feb 14th, they’ll have a final chance to show off their work at the Decoded Fashion Finale, a runway show where a winner will be chosen and offered a grand prize of $10,000.

And now, the finalists!

42

A retail engagement platform, 42 offers the power of online stores to their brick and mortar counterparts. A mobile app allows users to track products with simple scan of a barcode on in store items and mark them as “Try On” or “Purchase”, simulating the Wishlist and Shopping cart of online stores. This allows for future engagement with sales and algorithmically generated product recommendations based on past purchases. Users are incentivised to participate by an immediate in-store discount or sale. They can also mark items for later.

Congratulations to Cathy Han, Nicolas Porter, Lucas Lemanowicz and Sarah Hum for 42!

Read more on Hacker League.

Avant Garde

Helps designers move excess inventory by targeting customers who are more likely to purchase that particular product. They leverage a brand’s existing user databases to do real time image and sentiment analysis of their social media activity to find users who are most likely to to buy that item right now.

Designers can use that data to deliver targeted email campaigns to move specific inventory.

Congratulations to Carrie Mantha, Ajay Mantha, Dustin Hayes and Vladimir Dedov for Avant Garde!

Read more on Hacker League.

Coveted

GetCoveted.com

Coveted

An e-commerce backend for tumblr, Coveted is a platform that provides an easy way for designers to post their items tumblr and link their posts and photos to a buy now page. This means that any reflags, pins or shares will also link back to the product page. Once users have a Coveted account, they’re able to purchase items with a single click from the product page. They’re project is already live with an item for sale from a CFDA member.

Congratulations to Michael Dizon, Jason Fertel and Ian Culley for Coveted!

Coveted get’s an extra shout out for best use of Aviary in a hack! When users upload their product photos for tumblr, they’re able to touch them up using Aviary’s web editor.

Read more on Hacker League.

Fashion Dashboard

fashiondashboard.herokuapp.com

An analytics package that monitors social activity around brands and stores, provides customer insights, brand comparisons, and measured influence of local, nationwide and global campaigns.

Congratulations to Stephen Alber for Fashion Dashboard!

Read more on Hacker League.

SWATCHit

SWATCHit is a peer to peer platform that aims to connect global designers with emerging market artisans and overseas producers. They’re able to reduce complexities in overseas production by creating a direct communication channel between global designers and overseas producers, eliminating any intermediary channels and getting more revenue into the hands of the artisans.

Because they’re working directly with the artisans, their able to maintain a supplier database with analytics tools that designers can use to build their businesses.

Congratulations to Hendrika Makilya, Jag Gill, Jackson Lin and Paul Yun for SWATCHit!

Read more on Hacker League.

If you’d like to have Aviary at your Hackathon, feel free to reach out to ari@aviary.com.

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Aviary Announces Another New Partner: Photobucket!

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Vijay

For nearly a decade, Photobucket’s dedicated users have cherished the photo sharing and storage service. Those users have stored over 10 billion total images. With that magnitude of precious moments, Photobucket has a lot of responsibility on its hands. So, we’re honored that Photobucket has chosen Aviary as its photo editing solution. Now, Photobucket users can easily and effectively beautify their photos and albums with Aviary.

Photo editing has always been a core part of the Photobucket web experience, but Photobucket users are also highly active on mobile. With a new website recently launched, and upcoming updates to its mobile products, Photobucket turned to Aviary to provide robust and consistent cross-platform photo editing capabilities for its users. We carefully design our SDKs to be native to each platform we offer — iOS, Android, Windows Phone, HTML5 — so the product is strong, the deployment is simple, and users get a seamless and intuitive photo editing experience no matter where they are. Today, you’ll find Aviary on Photobucket’s website, and soon, on its iOS and Android apps.

So, what can you expect when editing photos on Photobucket? The integration is very intuitive, as the “Edit” option is available in several places across the site. Simply click this “Edit” button anywhere and our editor will pop up. Take a look:

PhotoBucket Editor

Photobucket has included all of our powerful tools, including “Splash” – our brand new color splash tool, which is already a user favorite.

photobucket colorsplash

We can’t wait to share what’s in store for Photobucket’s mobile applications.

Welcome to the Aviary Partner Network, Photobucket! We’re looking forward to seeing your photographers put our tools to work.

If you have an application or website and want to integrate the best photo editing experience, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at partners@aviary.com.

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Love is in the Aviary Showcase Apps

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Mike Mignano
Love Stickers

Love Stickers

It’s February, and that means Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching. To mark the occasion, we’re proud to announce the release of our Love Sticker Pack, available today in both our iOS and Android Showcase Apps for only $0.99.

The pack features a bunch of VDAY-themed goodies like hearts, candy, angel wings, and other fun stickers to help you celebrate the day. These are perfect for adorning photos of that special someone in your life on the 14th. So check them out, spread the Love, and add all sort of Valentine’s Day goodness to your photos.

Want to share your Love-decorated photos with us? Hit us up on Twitter. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Posted in Android, Aviary, iOS, Mobile | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coming Up: Aviary at Decoded Fashion Hackathon

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Ari

Aviary is super excited to be supporting our first Fashion Hackathon, Decoded Fashion presented by Condé Nast.

dflogo

The event will have over 500 attendees and API’s from Foursquare, Twilio, Sendgrid, Aviary and others. If you want help integrating beautiful photography into your app, come find me (I’ll be the tall guy in the Aviary T-Shirt). We’ll also be giving away an iPad mini for the best Aviary integration!

The event will be held this weekend, Feb 2nd at:

Alley NYC
500 7th Ave. Floor 17
New York, NY

For more details and to register, go here and use the promo code AVIARY for one of 4 free tickets.

Once you’ve registered, you can go ahead and start forming teams on the official HackerLeague page.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in Aviary, Event, Fun! | Tagged , | 1 Comment

iOS SDK Update 2.6: Beautiful New Effects, Frames and more

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Mike Mignano
Clyde

Clyde

Huge news, iOS developers: we just pushed an update to our iOS SDK, and it’s a big one.

We’ve added a bunch to version 2.6 that you’re definitely going to want to check out. First off, we’ve overhauled the default effects that come with the Effects tool. These new effects have a bit more subtlety to them than the previous set (and no longer include frames by default), making them better for a wider variety of photos. In addition, we’ve removed the effects canister screen, so now users can jump right into their effects without having to select a category first. This change was tested in our Showcase app and effects usage increased dramatically, so when you implement this new version, your users will likely be applying a lot more effects. Make sure you check out the Avenue, Cruz, and Clyde effects – these have been the most popular effects in our Showcase app, so you may want to promote these to your users in some way.

We’ve also introduced a brand new Frames tool that allows users to put decorative borders around any photo without having to rely on an effect. Our Showcase users love the flexibility that this new tool offers, so we’re really excited to be offering it through our SDK. Check out the Antique, Splatter, and Grit frames – we have found these to be super popular.

Lastly, we’ve updated the Meme and Text tools to support multiple line and increased overall performance throughout the SDK. So make sure you check it out! Let us know what you think in the comments below or get in touch on Twitter.

Posted in Aviary, iOS, Mobile | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

A Splash of Color in Aviary’s Android Showcase App

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Mike Mignano
Splash

Splash

Today we’re introducing a new feature in the latest version of our Android Showcase app: color splash. We’re incredibly excited about this, and once you take it for a spin, we think you will be too.

Our Splash tool allows you to strip all color from any photo, then magically add it back to any part of the image. It comes with two brush choices: Smart and Free. The Smart brush intelligently looks at the color you want to add back in, and only fills in parts of the image that are similar in color. The Free brush, on the other hand, is a total free-for-all and perfect if you just want to go nuts. It lets you re-color any part of the photo regardless of the hue. Also, don’t worry about messing up: if you make a mistake with either brush, you can always undo it with the built-in eraser.

Also in this version of the Android Showcase: new stickers! Our Space sticker pack was such a hit that we’ve added more of ‘em in a new pack we’re calling Galaxy. This one has nebulae, bursts, stars, crazy-looking lines, and other fun space stuff. Check it out.

Have you tried out Splash yet? Make some really cool images with it? If so, use the #aviary hashtag to share them with us on Twitter.

Happy Monday!

Posted in Android, Mobile | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment