Aviary Powered Half a Million Photo Edits on Christmas

Aviary, a startup that's developing a split personality, is now powering two million photo edits per week. This comes after a previous record of one million edits, reached just one month ago.

Powering this growth is Aviary's increasingly popular API and the increasingly popular apps that use it, especially mobile apps. In fact, the API has proven so successful that Aviary is making it its primary focus and its primary business.

Aviary has been around for five years now. In that time, it has built powerful image editing tools which it leveraged in its set of online apps, most of which are image editors.

The apps have their loyal set of users and a community around them. But it wasn't until earlier this year when Aviary released its API that it started to see some real usage and, more importantly, revenue.

Since the initial launch, the API has been expanded with more capabilities and a mobile version was launched. That's when things really started to pick up.

Photo sharing and editing apps have never been more popular, but the technology behind them is fairly complex. What's more, it's not that different from one app to the other. Rather than reinvent the wheel time and again, photo apps leveraged the Aviary tools.

Already, several mobile, web and desktop apps have integrated the Aviary API, including big names such as imgur or picplz.

Of course, a much better metric than the number of developers that are using Aviary is the number of people benefiting from it. The last few days, with a lot of people getting new phones, have been the APIs busiest, with half a million photo edits on Christmas day.

Before the Christmas weekend, the Aviary API was already powering two million edits a week. That number should now be much greater.