14 DAY TRIAL // Aviary, which has just shut down its older stand-alone online image editors, is celebrating a major milestone for the new Aviary platform on which it has been focusing for the past year, 1 billion photos edited across the 2,000 apps that use the Aviary APIs.
That's a huge number given that Flickr only has about seven billion photos in total, after all of its years existence.
Granted, Facebook hosts hundreds of billions of photos at this point. Luckily, the Aviary app and APIs are available for Facebook as well.
"1 billion photos have now been edited on Aviary’s new platform within our first 12 months of launching. And on our current trajectory, we expect to double that number by the end of 2012," Aviary announced.
"We now have grown to 2,000 partners, including Flickr, TypePad, Box, MailChimp, SquareSpace, Imgur and many others. Collectively across our network, almost 20 million users interact directly with our photo editor each month," it said.
Aviary launched its API about a year ago, when photo sharing apps were still all the rage. With everyone building photo apps everyone was rewriting the same code for basic editing functions, cropping, resizing, color correction plus the myriad of "filters" which are de rigueur for these apps.
The Aviary API provided all the editing functions you'd need, so these apps could focus on what made them different, if anything, rather than duplicating what everyone else was doing.
The Aviary API debuted with 30 partners and has grown to 2,000 today, with more coming. Aviary announced a couple of big new ones, Japan's Mixi, the largest social network there, depending on how you count, which will soon enable its users to edit their photos and add filters to them directly on their phones before they upload them. The second new partner is Mail.ru, which runs one of the big social networks in the country.