Mobile Spotlight: Picturelife

Have you been waiting for a better way to manage your iOS photos? Ever spent what felt like forever scrolling through your photos looking for that epic selfie for #tbt? How about that photo you took last year where you're "knocking down" the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Or that beautiful sunset photo you took on your honeymoon? Well the wait is over!

Picturelife has just announced a new version of their popular app that’s been rebuilt from the ground up to be a true replacement for the native iOS Photo experience! Users of the already powerful app can now access all of it’s amazing photo organization features without ever creating an account. Some of PictureLife’s killer features include:

• Auto-organization of your photos by Days, Places, Faces, Favorites and Screens, so it's super easy to find any photo you need or get lost in photos of past trips.
• Powerful photo editing with the Aviary SDK (developers download the SDK here)
• Picturelife Cloud access with 8GB free storage for photo backup and auto-sync down from Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox, and more!

We’re super excited about this latest update, and we think you will be too!

Download Picturelife now!

Want to get these updates in your inbox? Sign up here!

Need Expert Help Integrating Aviary? Try AirPair!

Whenever you’re working with a new technology, it can be incredibly helpful to have other developers to reach out to for their expertise. AirPair offers just that:

AirPair is a high quality network of software experts on the web that assists developers to quickly overcome any software challenge or learn a new technology. Their experts have a deep knowledge across many technology stacks and solutions (Hadoop, iOS, SAP integration, MongoDB sharding, etc). AirPair accelerates software development by “pairing” experts with customers in real-time via video and screen sharing – leading to better software, produced faster, and at lower costs.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Aviary Expert Page is now available as part of AirPair’s Trusted Partner Community Expert program! This means that when you run into trouble building out your photo apps, an Aviary expert will be available to help out, face to face, in real-time! Register as an Aviary expert, or find one now!

Want to get these updates in your inbox? Sign up here!

Photo Hack Day Japan Recap

On February 22-23rd, Aviary brought the 5th Photo Hack Day all the way around the globe to beautiful Tokyo, Japan. This year’s event was hosted by our good friends at Mixi with help from our amazing sponsors: Mixi, Shutterstock, gettyimages, 500px, Leap Motion, Amazon, Mashup9, Recruit, Imagga, EyeEm, Pux, XLoudia, Sendgrid, Zenrin, FlashFoto and Adobe.

We kicked the weekend off right with a pre-party Friday night, sponsored by our friends at Shutterstock. The excitement was palpable as Japanese hackers and API sponsors mingled and plotted, preparing for the main event.

Saturday was opened up with a keynote address by Shutterstock, followed by a round of API presentations by our generous sponsors, Japanese and Western alike. Any language barriers were broken down by a team of incredible translators from our friends at Mixi. Big shoutouts to Nozomi Yamawaki and Vishal Nayak!

The next 24 hours were a blur as more than 120 hackers, sponsors, and translators turned copious amounts of fried rice, sushi, beer, chuhai, and green tea into 23 inspiring hacks!

Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness originality, and overall real-world value of the application.

And now…the winners!

1st Place: Back to the Future (300,000 JYP)

Team: Theeraphol Wattanavekin, Rapee Suveeranont, Yoonjo Shin, Thiti Luang

Back to the Future is a visual learning app that allows you to "walk through time” via an interactive interface. It utilizes a Leap Motion controller to simulate moving through history and reveals the visual evolution of people, places and things over the course of time. You can try the app here.

2nd Place: Before The Filter (200,000 JYP)

Team: Benjamin Watanabe, Antony Tran

Before the filter is an Android app that teaches would-be photographers the fundamentals of Photography. It introduces the user to a variety of topics, including composition, techniques for taking food photos, landscape photos, and even selfies. It also provides "training wheels" in the form of grid and template overlays in a custom camera interface to teach the user about proper composition. After a photo is taken with the app, it provides tips for editing the photo (using the Aviary SDK) based on the style of photography the user is in the process of learning. Finally, the user can share their before and after photos to show their progress. Most impressive, the hack is already available for download in the Google Play store. Check it out yourself.

Additional congratulations to Benjamin and Antony for winning Best Use of Aviary’s API!

3rd Place: VOCA Getty (100,000 JYP)

Team: Atsushi Onoda, Hiroshi Kanamura, Shinichi Segawa, Yasushi Takemoto

VOCA Getty is an innovative photo dictionary app that uses images sourced from Getty Images to help users learn a language visually.

The judges also came out with 2 honorable mentions that received Lomography cameras from our good friends at Sendgrid! Congratulations to Yabu Kiyohide (薮 キヨヒデ) and Yuya Matsuo (松尾勇也) for Na･Gu･Ri･A･I and Akira Muramatsu for Smile Motion!

Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Rick Martin (Writer/Editor, The Bridge), Tobias Peggs (CEO, Aviary), Wyatt Jenkins (VP of Product, Shutterstock), Naoki Sadakuni (Country Manager, Pinterest Japan), and Takafumi Nanao (Technical Consultant, Mixi) for overcoming the challenges of whittling down 23 amazing English and Japanese hacks to just 3!

For a complete list of API and Event prizes, check out the PHDJapan Winners list, and for a list of all of the hacks presented, take a look at the PHDJapan Submissions list. For more photos of the event, search for the #PHDJapan tag on Twitter. We’ll be adding some of our favorites to the Photo Hack Day Facebook page.

Congrats again to all of our winners, and thank you to our amazing sponsors who contributed more than $15,000 in cash and prizes! We had a ton of fun at PHDJapan, and we hope to see you at the next one!

Cheers,

Photo Hack Day Team

Announcing Photo Hack Day Japan!

We're excited to announce that registration is open for Photo Hack Day Japan! This year's Photo Hack Day is a collaboration with our good friends at Mixi and will be hosted at their headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. More details below:

Who: Our friends, old and new, in the photo space
What: Another full weekend of photo-centric awesomeness!
When: February 22-23rd, 2014
Where: Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

This year's PHD promises to be an exciting event with more than $15k in prizes, and a ton of amazing API's and Sponsors:

mixi
Shutterstock 
500px
GettyImages
LeapMotion
Amazon
Mashup Awards 9
Recruit 
Imagga
EyeEm
SendGrid
Xloudia TV
Pux
Adobe
Zenrin Datacom

Sign up for the event here: http://photohackdayjapan.peatix.com/

Aviary and Mixi bring Photo Hack Day to Japan!

After four super successful Photo Hack Days, Aviary is bringing the fun across the globe to our friends in Japan! Co-hosted by Mixi, PHD5 will unite talented developers and designers in the Tokyo area to build amazing applications using web and mobile APIs.

Who: All of our design and dev friends in the photo space

What: An exciting, weekend-long coding marathon!

When: February 21-23, 2014

Where: Mixi Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

Why: Showcase your mad skills and creativity with APIs in front of hundreds of top developers and designers. Also, teams will compete for a chance to win big prize money, tech gear and the wonderment of your startup peers!

From NYC to San Francisco, our four sold-out Photo Hack Days have brought in over 1500 developers and designers as well as more than 250 hacks. The result? Some pretty incredible projects, like last year’s winner, Letsgo.io (http://letsgo.io/). The Letsgo.io team created a cool website for travelers that shows photos of all the sights they’ll see on an upcoming trip. It’s a great way to visually map out a trip - and it was just one of the many hacks that were impressively original, creative, functional and visually stunning.

We are beyond excited to bring Photo Hack Day 5 to Japan and can’t wait to see the results!  

Read more about the event in Mixi's official release.

For more information, including sponsorship opportunities, contact phd@aviary.com

Aviary Photo Hack Day 4 at Facebook HQ

Panel L to R: Brett Wayn (Flickr), Jack Levin (ImageShack), Flo Meissner (EyeEm), Liyan Chang (FilePicker.io), and moderator Avi Muchnick (Aviary) at PHD4.

Panel L to R: Jim Heiser (Adobe), Kristen Berman (Lytro), Lucas Buick (Hipstamatic), and Dirk Stoop (Facebook) at PHD3.

Aviary at Mobile Photo Connect - Come and join us!

It goes without saying that mobile photography has completely revolutionized the way we both capture and share photos. Less than three years ago cameras on cell phones were still a novelty. Now, mobile photography is the main event at the launch of any hot new smartphone - from Apple to Android.

This rapid growth makes the race for the “next big thing” in MoPho even more competitive for developers. At Aviary, we love our developer friends and want to make sure they’re ahead in this race, which is why we’re beyond excited for our own Co-founder and Chief of Product, Avi Muchnick to join Darren Johnson (Kodak Alaris’ Chief Growth Officer) to share best practices for smart, simple MoPho API integration through a talk, “Weeding through the API Jungle” at Mobile Photo Connect October 15.

As an opening event to GigaOm Mobilize, Mobile Photo Connect is a solid day-long conference that will focus on how mobile photography is disrupting and revolutionizing the way we capture, share and experience photos. It’s a great chance for us mobile app developers to get cross-inspiration from others in the photography space, such as Samsung, Nokia, Kodak, Nero, Fujifilm, HP and Adobe. A brilliant idea (if we do say so ourselves) by event co-hosts Hans Hartman, president of Suite 48 Analytics and Alexis Gerard, founder of Future Image Inc.

Overall, there is a sweet line-up of MoPho topics. Here a few that we’re particularly pumped about:

• The world of mobile photography in 2013 and beyond - a discussion with mobile photography journalists and analysts on what’s trending in the industry.

• The connected camera perspective - what should we expect as the gap between cameras and smartphones continues to narrow?

• Monetization options for photo apps - How to make money. Enough said.

We want to invite our Aviary community (here’s looking at you developers!) to take part in this conference and receive a special discount of $100 off regular attendance from our friends at Mobile Photo Connect. Redeem here: http://mobilephotoconnect.eventbrite.com/?discount=aviary

Get the rest of the story at www.mobilephotoconnect.com.

Hope to see you there!

Aviary Events: iOS7 Features and Design Paradigms for Developers

As many of you know, the team at Aviary has spent the last few months knee deep in an iOS7 redesign for our popular Photo Editor by Aviary. We’ve learned a ton of lessons and best practices along the way that we want to give back to the developer community.

To that end, we’ll be hosting an event next Tuesday (Sept 24th) at Aviary HQ in NYC where you can come hear about how we handled the transition of our Photo Editor SDK (which powers over 5000 applications reaching 65 million users), and standalone app (Photo Editor by Aviary, which has retained its spot in the top 5 Photo & Video apps since it launched last year).

Have an app of your own? Bring it! We’ll also be doing Q&A for developers who are looking for advice on updating their own applications for iOS7.

Register for the event below:

http://aviary-ios7.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there!

Twilio + Aviary for MMS Photo Editing

Congratulations to our friends at Twilio on their new MMS and picture messaging support! We're super excited to see what the developer community comes up with. 

For all of the Twilio+Aviary developers out there, here are some examples of the kinds of MMS Photo apps that we'd love to see:

• By combining Twilio's API with Aviary's Server-side API, developers can build apps that automagically autocorrect texted images and forward them to a recipient. 
• We'd also love to see apps that allow a user to text a photo, apply an Aviary filter and automatically tweet it, or share it to Facebook.

If you're building a Twilio photo app and would like access to our Server-side API, let us know by emailing partners@aviary.com and we'll hook you up with a whitelisted API Key and some additional documentation.

Ink Mobility Releases Open Source Photo Apps with Aviary SDK

Several months ago, Aviary announced a partnership with Ink Mobility (formerly Filepicker.io) to help developers quickly and easily integrate Aviary’s Photo Editing technology with Ink's image importing and exporting SDK. Earlier this week, Ink Mobility announced their new Ink Mobile Framework which allows iOS developers to share data, including photos, between iOS applications. A sorely needed feature that is already available to Android developers. You can try one of the pilot applications, ThatPhoto, which allows users to edit their photos using the Aviary SDK and send them to a number of supported Framework applications, including Evernote and Box.com.

Today, we have even more exciting Aviary/Ink Mobility news! Ink has just released a series of open source mobile applications in an effort to show off their new Mobile Framework, and more importantly, to encourage growth in the Open Source mobile app movement. The aforementioned ThatPhoto is among these open source applications, and is a fantastic reference for anyone looking to build a mobile Photo Application using the Ink and Aviary SDK’s. Because these applications are publicly shared on Github, any iOS developer looking to developer a photo application will have a published reference app that they can fork and improve upon for their own needs.

You can find a complete list of FilePicker's open sourced applications below:

• ThatPhoto iTunes | GitHub - Includes Aviary's SDK
• ThatPDF iTunes | Github
• ThatInbox iTunes | Github
• ThatCloud iTunes | Github

Developers looking for further Aviary integration samples can always check out the Sample Application included in our SDK download.

Windows 8 Partner Spotlight: PhotoWeaver

PhotoWeaver is a powerful tool for managing and sharing photos across a variety of sources, including Facebook, Google+, Skydrive and your local hard drive. PhotoWeaver also includes a slideshow feature which allows you to display beautiful slideshows on any screen in your home.

By embedding Aviary's Windows 8 SDK, PhotoWeaver has created a powerful, full-service tool for managing and editing your photos across all of your services.

## Features

* View photos from services like Facebook, Google+, SkyDrive and from your local hard drive on your Tablet, laptop or desktop. * Upload multiple photos simultaneously with a single button click to services such as Facebook, Google+ or SkyDrive. * Advanced editing functionality like effects, enhancements, stickers, rotate, crop etc. * Share photos with friends and family without leaving the app, using Share charm. * Browse through your photos as thumbnails, or in a full screen slideshow. * View and Manage comments from multiple social networks, all from one app * Use the Devices charm to view photos on a TV with Xbox or other Windows certified Play To Device.

Download Photo Weaver from the Windows Store now.

Also keep an eye out for the Android version, coming soon.