Mobile Spotlight: MyPics

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We recently launched our photo-editing SDK, a mobile version of our popular web-based simple photo editor. Developers of mobile applications can now add our photo editor’s powerful functionality into any iPhone or Android app with just a few lines of code! Read on to see what MyPics did with our tools, or check out the rest of our partners to see how they’re putting our editor to use.

Picasa users, rejoice! MyPics is a web albums manager that allows you to take care of all of your Picasa web albums from your phone. With the addition of Aviary’s mobile editor, we’ve teamed up to allow you to access and edit all your Picasa photos and videos from a single app.

Download the iPhone app now!

 

Better yet, every photo is cached on your iPhone or iPod, which means that you can view them even when internet access is unavailable. (Subway riders, rejoice some more!) Not only can you carry the entirety of your collections in the palm of your hand, but you can also view the public albums of your friends or the albums they choose to share with you.

In addition to on-the-go viewing and sharing, MyPics users now have Aviary’s editing functionality within the app’s clean, seamless interface. Another awesome partnership means more ways to make your photos better than ever.

Minus Integrates Aviary API!

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The Aviary API provides seamless, in-app editing tools for web and mobile. To learn more about our product and what it can do for you, check out our developer site.

Minus is a wonderfully simple, drag-and-drop file uploader that enables users to publish, share, and manage their files in the cloud. Not only does Minus offer unlimited file transfers and downloads, as well as the ability to explore and discover other shared content, but the entire service is free.

Here’s where Aviary comes in: if you upload your photos to Minus for storage — and let’s be honest, storing photo albums on your computer reduces its speed to a mere crawl — you now have the additional ability to edit them, with Aviary’s simple editor, on their site. True to the simplicity and ease of Minus’ interface, our editor is as easy as a one-click fix.

 

To see the combined forces of Minus and Aviary in action, go to Minus.com, drag a photo into the box conveniently titled “Drag & Drop Files Here To Upload”, and watch as it is automatically uploaded into your Minus account.

 

 

After your photo has been uploaded, click on the “Edit Image” button in the bottom right hand corner.

 

Et voilà! Aviary’s web editor pops up in-line, which means you can fix your photos without ever having to leave Minus. Sweet and simple, right?

You may notice that the editor looks a little different from our original design. We’ve worked together with Minus to produce a customized skin, and it serves as an excellent example of how our editor can be customized to fit your site! If you’d like to look into customizing our Web API for your own site, give us a hoot!

At Aviary, we appreciate intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces. In many cases, the easier it is to use, the more challenging it is to design and build, which is testimony to the fact that we think Minus is one of the best examples of file sharing out there. Our partnership with Minus — bringing together two simple, yet powerful, services in seamless fashion — reflects our desire to keep your internet experience as effortless and straightforward as possible.

We’re very proud to call Minus a partner, and don’t forget to check out their wonderful, free file sharing service!

Mobile Spotlight: Pic Collage

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We recently launched our photo-editing SDK, a mobile version of our popular web-based simple photo editor. Developers of mobile applications can now add our photo editor’s powerful functionality into any iPhone or Android app with just a few lines of code! Read on to see what Pic Collage did with our tools, or check out the rest of our partners to see how they’re putting our editor to use.

Aviary’s Feather SDK and Pic Collage have joined forces to make two already simple, intuitive interfaces even more awesome.

See why 900,000 (and growing!) people love Pic Collage. Download the iPhone app now.

Pic Collage is a fun, simple way to create photo collages and share them with friends and family. Photos can be resized, rotated, and moved to the front of back with a few taps, pinches, or flicks. The application uses photos from your mobile device, your Facebook albums, or even your friends’ Facebook albums — after all, why limit the selection to what’s on your phone? When you’re done, the finished product can be shared via email, tweeted on Twitter, or posted to Facebook.

To open Feather in Pic Collage’s app, upload a photo by tapping on the camera icon to bring it onto your screen. Double tap on the photo you wish to edit. Our effects, color, brightness, and saturation tools will slide up into the application.

After you’ve tweaked your photo to your liking, use Pic Collage’s effortless resizing and layering functionality to create your collage.

The final product looks like something straight out of a personal scrapbook, sans paper clippings and messy glue. Did we mention that you do all of this on your phone?

“The Aviary SDK is perfect for our photo collage app. Just double-tap a photo in Pic Collage and the editing tools pop up, making it super easy to add effects and filters on the fly.” - John Fan, Co-Founder

We’re big fans of collaboration, and we think our partnership with Pic Collage is a perfect way to ensure that viewing a batch of unedited photos is a thing of the past. Pic Collage makes it possible to turn multiple, individual photos into a single project, and Aviary makes sure each image is looking its best. How’s that for teamwork?

Want to try Pic Collage for yourself? Download the app here!

Mobile Spotlight: Fashism

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Last week we launched our photo-editing SDK, a mobile version of our popular web-based simple photo editor. Developers of mobile applications can now add our photo editor’s powerful functionality into any iPhone or Android app with just a few lines of code! We love how Fashism integrated our SDK – read on to see what they did, or check out the rest of our partners to see how they’re putting our editor to use!

Fashism is a forum where users can take pictures of their daily getup and submit them (via website or mobile application) for feedback. The sartorial-savvy community then weighs in with their verdict — love it or hate it — and can submit comments about suggestions to improve an outfit (“Hike up that skirt to your waist!”) or compliment elements that they’re particularly fond of (“So hip it hurts!”).

Fashism users will now be able to tweak their photos to the point of post-ready perfection, without having to leave the app to do it! Indoor lighting is notoriously difficult to fix in photos, but we think Aviary’s tools are just the right fit. Users can fix their dressing room pictures in one click with our magical Enhance filter, or use our brightness, contrast, saturation, and color tools for manual perfection in undoing even the harshest fluorescence.

Download the Fashism iPhone app now!

To see Aviary’s editor strut its stuff in the Fashism mobile app, upload a new (or existing) photo by selecting the “Post” button in the middle of the toolbar.

The app will then give you the option to edit your photos by tapping on the pink “Photo Tools” button to the right of the image. Our editor will slide up inside the Fashism app, revealing a range of one-tap fixes

(You may notice that the editor looks a little different from our default design; Fashism has taken advantage of the ability to customize the mobile interface to match their brand!)

 To learn more about Fashism, please refer to their website or download the iPhone app. Don’t forget to check out the stylish ladies of Fashism, as featured in Lucky Magazine!

Aviary Launches Embeddable Photo Editor for Mobile!

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Our company mission has always been to power the world’s creativity. We started with the web. Why stop there? Mobile apps need love too, which is why we’ve brought our creative expertise to the land of mobile. Today, we’re super excited to announce the launch of our brand new mobile initiative: photo editing for all iPhone and Android apps!

What this means for you

Developers: imagine your app’s workflow. Your user takes a photo and wants to upload it to their profile – but first they need to edit it. Maybe they want to crop it, remove red eye, or add some fun filters. No matter what, they have to leave your app, open one of their photo editing apps, edit their photo, save it to their camera roll… you see where this is going.

Now imagine your app’s workflow with Aviary. Your user takes a photo and wants to upload it to their profile. They click the “Edit” button, a screen slides up with one-click editing options, they make their choices and save, and they continue on with your app, with their updated photo intact. Pretty magical, right?

How it works

As of today, any and all mobile developers will be able to inject Aviary’s photo editing functionality right into their own app – all without the fuss of developing it on their own. Currently, our SDK is available for iPhone and Android devices. iPad support is on the way, and our SDK is 100% compatible with the forthcoming iOS 5.

Our Mobile SDK lets you focus on the core of your app, while we provide the photo editing tools and maintain them for you along the way. This will not only add extra functionality for your users, it’ll bring us one step closer to our mission of powering the world’s creativity.

The best part is, it takes just minutes to implement!

Features

Our Mobile SDK includes a great variety of tools and effects, with more on the way. We work hard to make all of them powerful enough to please your pickiest users, but so simple that beginners can start editing in no time. You can choose to include all the tools we have to offer, or customize the toolset for your app to cater directly to your userbase.

Our basic editing tools include:

  • Auto-Enhance: fix any photo with one click!
  • Crop, Flip, Rotate
  • Sharpen and Blur
  • Redeye Removal
  • Teeth Whitening and Blemish Removal
  • Adjust Colors and Saturation
  • Adjust Brightness and Contrast

Our more fun, hip, and addicting features include:

  • Drawing
  • Text
  • Stickers
  • Meme Generator
  • Photo Effects

 

The details

Both the iPhone and the Android SDK are free to use and implement.

Although our Mobile SDK is ready to go straight out of the box (we designed it to blend seamlessly with the default mobile UIs that your users know and love), there are a variety of customization options available to ensure that our photo editing functionality feels right at home in your app.

  • Android: Choose your toolset, change the color scheme,  and replace the icon holders. (Note: Changing the color + icon holders does require development time, as we do not provide a built-in way to change the interface… yet.)
  • iOS: Same as Android, except the iOS SDK has an easier method to customize the color schemes to match your brand! Just pass in a color when initializing the interface.

 

Further customization for both platforms is coming soon! If you’d like to be notified as soon as details are available, be sure to follow @AviaryApi on twitter or join our Google Group for developers.

Check out this demo to see how it all works!

 

What happens next?

We’re currently working on a ton of new tools and filters. We’ll prioritize new features from this point on based on partner feedback (what your users like, as well as what they wish were included). On top of porting all of the effects from our web-based Effects API to mobile, we also plan to reveal some awesome, never-before-seen effects :)

If there’s something in particular you’d like to see included in a future version of our Mobile SDK, please let us know! (You can also use that link to browse and upvote existing requests that you’d love to see come to fruition.)

Launch partners!

One of the reasons we developed this mobile SDK was that we felt there was a definite demand in the market for built-in simple photo editing, but that not every developer has the time on their hands to build or manage such a feature. Whether or not an app’s core is photo-related, every user can benefit from additional editing features after uploading their photos. From social networks to geolocation, we’ve partnered up with all sorts of apps to prove just that. Here are 30+ iOS and Android apps we’re proud to have as launch partners!

Get started!

Visit developers.aviary.com/mobile to instantly inject photo FUNctionality straight into your app’s workflow. You can thank us later! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or subscribe to our blog to be notified of our latest happenings.

7 Aviary API Hacks from Photo Hack Day

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Last weekend, Photo Hack Day showcased the APIs of over 25 companies in the online image space. Of a total of 42 hacks, 7 utilized the Aviary API, using Feather and/or our Effects API — we’re absolutely thrilled about it! For those unaware, Feather is our embeddable image editor that allows users to directly edit their images inline, and our Effects API allows you to bulk process photos, applying fun stylistic filters and more. In no particular order, here’s the list (w/ links if applicable):

 

1. ALBUM+ : SMS photo voting + Image editing with Feather

 

2. HoneyBadger: Computer safety application meets animated badgers, meets memes using our Meme Generator from the Effects API.

 

3. BirthdayCards (coming soon): Send real, customized postcards to your friends for their birthdays.

 

4. PhotoBot: Robotic critic analyzes photos, offers suggestions for taking better pictures.

 

5. Stash Your ‘Stashe (link coming soon): Wonder how you’d look clean-shaved?

 

6. MyCanvazz (link coming soon): Online sketch pad for accurate exchange of designs, made possible with Feather.

 

7. Comic Cam (link + screenshots coming soon): Easily make comic strips using the Comic Book Filter from the Effects API

To stay up to date on our latest happenings, subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Winners and full list of hacks from Photo Hack Day!

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We had a great turnout this weekend at Photo Hack Day, Aviary’s photo-centric hackathon. With all the awesome hacks (over 40!) that were presented on Sunday, the judges really had their work cut out for them. Check out the winners and the full list of hacks below, and stay tuned for the next Aviary API contest if these apps get your gears turning!

1st place: Photobot – Mason Du, Oscar G Torres. APIs used: Flickr, Face.com, Aviary, Shutterstock

2nd place: HoneyBadger – Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

3rd place: Nostalgia – Rolf Rando, Jahanzeb Khawaja. APIs used: Instagram

Honorable mentions: Emotional Breakdown and PhotoBombr

People’s choice: HoneyBadger – Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

FULL LIST OF HACKS:

ALBUM+ – Amir Shimoni. APIs used: Twilio, Aviary, Instagram, Trove/Flickr, Face.com

AllPaper – Hung Truong. APIs used: Instagram, 500px

Beard Me – Michael Schonfeld. APIs used: Face.com

BigBG – Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Flickr, 500px, Magickly

BirthdayCards (iOS) (Winner, best use of Sincerely API) - Cameron Spickert. APIs used: Sincerely Ship Library, Aviary Feather SDK for iOS, Facebook Graph API

Comics Cam – Gilad Shai. APIs used: Aviary

CrowdFrames (Winner, best use of 500px API) – Ben Moss, Samantha John. APIs used: Twilio, 500px

Emotional Breakdown (Winner, best use of Face.com API, best use of Lomography API) – Andy Mangold, Anthony Mattox. APIs used: Face.com facial recognition API, Google Charts API

Everybody Can See Now! – Arcadius, Peggy. APIs used: Twilio, 500px

Faceswap – Lei. APIs used: Face.com

Facialytics – Jonathan Bensamoun, Ryan Hittner, Megan Janel Zimmer. Twitter: @facialytics. APIs used: Face.com

FlickHundred (Winner, best use of 500px API, runner up use of Flickr API) - Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Flickr, 500px

Friendpocalypse – Greg Galant, Lee Semel, Wylie Conlon, Will Charczuk, Jeremiah Malina, Bojan Mitrevski, Gautier Julien. APIs used: Face.com, Facebook

Graffiti.js – Aidan Feldman. APIs used: none

Happy Mug – Greg Landweber, Andy Minkstein. APIs used: Facebook, Face.com, MoPho Engine

Hipster Hash – Joe McCourt. APIs used: none

HoneyBadger (Winner, 2nd place, People’s Choice) - Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

Instagirl (iOS) – Ajay Chainani. APIs used: Face.com, Instagram

Kinect Photos Proof of Concept – Justin Hart. APIs used: Photobucket, Kinect

Moodify – Michael Schonfeld. APIs used: Face.com, Spotify, EchoNest

Protestr – Chris Haseman. APIs used: Imgur, Tumblr, Flickr

SocialPhotoStock – Jose de Cabo, Alex Dantart, Pau Sabria, Luis Sanz, Sebastian Alvarez. APIs used: 500px, Picplz, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, Photobucket, Twitter

Stash Your ‘Stache (Winner, best use of Aviary API) - Sara Chipps, Christina Lutters, Brenda Storer. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary

Tag Fight! – David Huerta. APIs used: Twilio, Flickr

TrueLookAlike - Carmen Delessio. APIs used: Face.com, Facebook

Underwear-Model-ify Yourself via MMS – Robb. APIs used: Face.com

Voronoi Diacam (Winner, best use of Flickr API) - David Chan, Max Gribov, David Cilia, Alexander Sagalovskiy, Shepherd X, Axel Forest, Christopher Kennedy. APIs used: Flickr, Face.com, Foursquare

ZoneMinder – Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Twilio, Foursquare

If you want to add a URL for your hack or have a correction, please email us at photohackday@aviary.com or hit up Erin on twitter.

Six brand new filters added to our Effects API!

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Great news, everyone! Our awesome effects engineer Joe (I like to call him our imagineer) has been hard at work cranking out even more awesome filters to use with Aviary’s Effects API.

Here are the five we launched earlier this week, including our beloved Auto Enhance, if you need a refresher.

Note: even if you’re not a developer, you can still use these awesome effects on your photos! Eventually they’ll all be available through our simple editor Feather, but until then you can use them through our developer site. Just upload the photo of your choice and go!

Here’s a peek at today’s new filters. Take a look, and then try them out yourself over on our developer site. Enjoy!

 

Always Sunny: Bring the sun with you wherever you are. Make all your friends jealous by going on a tropical vacation in your own backyard! They’ll never know.

Code Red: Tired of looking at life like it’s not a post-apocalyptic video game? We’ve got you covered.

Color Operations: Mess with the colors in your photos all you want. You’ll find the regulars like saturation and brightness, but also some advanced things like hue shift and gamma adjustments.

Meme Generator: Already a crowd favorite here at Aviary HQ. Everything is funnier when you put silly text on it! This filter has been tested and approved by your fellow Redditors.

Negative: Turns your world inside out!

Outline: This one’s really cool. You kind of have to try it to get a sense of its power. Try variations with different outline colors and backgrounds for a ton of effects.

To stay up to date with the latest filter releases, subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook!