The golden age of mobile photography is upon us. Smartphones are now more capable at producing high-quality photos than digital cameras were just five years ago. Editing photos has been an evolving process but a lot of great services have been released to mobile users in the last year such as filters from Instagram or full-featured suites from Aviary and Skitch. Today, Aviary is making a dramatic update to its platform to gives users a set of powerful tools to edit photos on the go.
Aviary, which has its roots as a popular photo editing browser extension, released the first version of its mobile toolset four months ago. Aviary’s software developer kit (SDK) can be implemented by mobile developers to add photo-editing functionality to any app. Users are now editing over 10 million photos on mobile a month and is growing 50% a month.
Version 2 of Aviary mobile releases a bunch of new feature and performance updates. Here is a breakdown of what is new:
One-touch auto-enhance: The ability to easily touch up a photo without going through a complicated editing process. Use one of Aviary’s pre-set optimization settings and enhance a photo with a tap.
Improved effects: 10 more effects with new border designs.
Unique dials: This is really a user interface function. A dial instead of a slider for brightness and color palettes.
Stickers: Bowties, cigars, funny glasses.
New design: What would an update be to a mobile app if it did not completely throw out its old design and start anew. Sometimes this works for the better, many times it does not.
Minimal branding: This is perhaps the best rollout for this version of Aviary and hopefully it is not limited to just the mobile versions of the apps. Anyone that has used an Aviary extension before knows that the little blue lower-case A company logo pops up on just about everything you want to edit or take a screen shot of. This is now hidden and can be accessed by swiping to the last page of the app for details.
Aviary is up to date with all the mobile platforms. It can instituted by developers writing apps for Android 2.2 (API level 8) or higher or iOS 4+. It will also work on all browsers and tablets that support HTML5, JavaScript or Flash.
Aviary also wants to help developers make money through the mobile SDK. Users of apps that have Aviary embedded can purchase premium effects as well as original and branded stickers. Aviary will split the revenue with the app maker.
Note, at the time of publication, the Aviary app was still awaiting Apple App Store approval. It can be found through partner apps such as Pic Stitch.
Does Aviary outshine Skitch or other photo editors on iOS and Android? The SDK is a clever bit of implementation for developers to add photo editing capabilities to apps. Let us know what you think of the newest version in the comments.
