The filters in Aviary’s Cloud API can be used alone through our server or integrated into our web/mobile SDKs. Add them to your app or website, or try them out with any pic you want!

We’ve just added another handful of new effects to our Cloud API – some of our personal favorites to date, actually.

Read on to see the details, or jump right to our developer site to check out the full list!

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

First Photo: A hip upgrade to the classic old-timey filter. Make all your photos look not just old, but timeless!

Malibu: Transform even your dullest, most poorly lit moments into ones that might have been enjoyed in the California sun. We’re all about making you look better. You’re welcome.

Maya: I went on about this filter for so long that they named it after me. It’s like our super-dramatic cinematic filter, but retro! The best of both worlds.

San Carmen: Speaking of things we can’t stop talking about, this filter has definitely been turning heads at Aviary HQ. It’s that perfect retro effect we’ve all been craving for our terribly modern profile pics.

Sin City: Make everything you do look tougher, edgier, and a little bit chilly.

Keep in mind that the parameters for these filters are different every time, so you can refresh to tweak your results. What are you waiting for? Go try these effects on your own photos now!

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

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.

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.

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!

A few months ago, we revealed the newest member of our API family: our Effects API. It’s a server-side API which allows developers to quickly and easily apply utilities and cool filters to photos on their own site. For example, instead of just uploading your users’ photos, you can crop them to avatar proportions and automatically fix the color levels of the photos or turn them into polaroids. Whatever floats your boat!

We launched with 20+ filters, and are pleased to announce five brand new ones which are available today! These filters are even more user-friendly, as they all improve photos with just one click, and a little birdy told us that more brand new filters are coming next week

We think these are pretty great, but we also know there can never be enough variety! If there are utilities or effects you’d love to be able to apply to the photos on your site, email us and let us know! You can always reach us at support@aviary.com.

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!

So, without further ado, here are today’s new filters. Take a look, and then try them out yourself over on our developer site. Enjoy!

Auto Enhance: Bring out colors and details, fix levels, generally make your world a better looking place! (We’re already applying this filter to all of our photos.)

Cinematic: Your life, if it were a movie. Specifically, a docudrama starring maybe Tom Hanks. Not that we’ve thought about it that much or anything.

Daydream: The soft white glowy vignette that you’ve been dreaming of.

Heatwave: High saturation, intense colors, and that general feeling of an oasis just a few more steps ahead.

Indiglow: It doesn’t just make your photos purple.

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

When we first launched our simple photo editor (codename: Feather) back in November, we were pretty confident people would love it but we didn’t expect it to get to where it is today so soon.

We’ve gotten the chance to partner up with a variety of awesome websites, giving their users a shockingly powerful ability to edit their photos with one-click options – something they’d never had before.

Since then, we’ve built in the ability for sites to host custom skins to better match their brand, choose the toolsets that best fit their users, and even change the language of Feather to their hearts’ content.

Today, we’re taking it to the next level. We’re proud to announce that Feather now supports high resolution photos! What does this mean, exactly? It means any website hosting high resolution photos can give their users the freedom of enhancing their photo without losing any quality or having to reduce the final size.

On that note, we’re also super excited to announce our first High Resolution partner, Ning!

How will the High Resolution Feather work?

Your user will edit their image in the browser, just like before. On save, a log of the user’s interactions (quick-edits, added filters and effects) is sent to our servers along with a url to the high resolution version of the image. The user’s actions are then replicated on the high resolution image, and the final output is posted back to your server.

It’s that simple! Ready to get started? Visit developers.aviary.com/FeatherAPI.

In order to utilize hi-res editing, you’ll need to set a new global parameter before launching Feather.

• Feather_HiResURL = ‘http://yoursite.com/hiresimage.png’
• On save, an additional parameter is posted to your PostURL: hiresurl
• This parameter contains a link to the edited high resolution image.

You can find additional documentation on developers.aviary.com/featherapi. If you have any questions regarding High Res Feather, feel free to send an email to us at api@aviary.com!

Great news for our international partners! Our embeddable simple image editor (Feather) is now available for localization in any language. If you’re interested in implementing Feather on your site in a language other than English, please contact us at api@aviary.com.

If you’re interested in being notified the next time a new Feather feature is available, sign up here!

It’s Internet Week in NYC!

If you live in the area, or plan on taking a day trip, come visit us! We’ve partnered up with SimpleGeo and SendGrid to present:

What is API Hack Day? It’s a day where developers will get together for an all-day coding fest.  Developers of all experience levels will be collaborating together to share ideas on current and future projects. They’ll focus and collaborate with one another to build awesome apps with various APIs, and with the recent launch of our Effects API, it’s a perfect event for us to be a part of.

The event is FREE to attend and hack. Food and drinks will be provided as well.

It will be held tomorrow, Thursday, June 9th, 2011 from 8:30AM – 8:00PM (EST)

Visit InternetWeekNY.com to learn more, or get your tickets now!

We’re more than excited to announce we’ve chosen a winner for the Aviary Developer Contest! If you’re not aware, we held our first-ever developer contest, allowing developers of all skill levels to participate in a 2 week hack-a-thon! The rules were simple – build something spectacular with our new Effects API.

After a week of debate, we’ve finally been able to choose the top 3 winners. Each application was graded on technical accomplishment, cleverness, originality, and of course, the value of the application. Bonus points were given for coming up with something completely unique! The top 3 winners will be showered with gifts, as well as being featured in our Apps Gallery (coming soon)!

Without further ado….the grand prize winner, taking home a brand new iPad 2, is……

Joel Watson!

Joel’s app, Effected, gives users an easy way to upload images, crop and resize them, and then apply a variety of super-sweet Aviary filters to them. Plus you can easily ship them off to any of your Facebook photo albums after!  Congrats Joel!

Coming in as the runner-up, and the new owner of an awesome F-Stop watch, is…..

John Pencola!

John’s app, Let’s Make a Puzzzzle, allows users to upload a photo to transform into a filter-ized puzzle, with difficulty levels ranging from ‘passing time’ to ‘nearly impossible’. Congrats John!

And last but not least, the honorable mention (+a box of Aviary swag) goes to……

Florian Plag!

Florian’s app, Instant Camera, is a web-based application that applies a randomly selected Polaroid filter onto your selected image! Images can be taken instantly from your webcam, or uploaded from your desktop. Download the result, or share it on Facebook and Twitter! Congrats Florian!

Congrats to Joel, John, and Florian for creating these awesome apps with our Effects API! With such great submissions, we’re looking forward to running another API contest next month. To find out exactly when it starts, follow us on twitter @aviary (for all Aviary updates) or @aviaryapi (for just developer related updates), or subscribe to our blog!

We’ve been working hard at improving our API and just wanted to share a few of our recent changes to our developer site with you.

First, we’ve added a new code library for……. Android! That’s right, our first mobile library is ready for your mobile applications. Use our Effects API to power your app’s photo editing, whether you’re looking to provide your users with fun filters or utilities like crop and red eye. You can find the documentation and code in the brand new Android section.

Here are 2 sample screenshots from an Android app built in house

Speaking of code, we’ve also moved our libraries to GitHub for easier code management by us and code downloading by you. You can check out our profile and libraries at https://github.com/aviaryapi. We’ve also linked to some user-contributed libraries for node.js and ColdFusion so if you write your own wrapper, please do let us know and we’ll add it to the list!

For those of you hackers who are too cool for wrappers or libraries and prefer to access the REST API directly, we’ve added JSON support to all our API calls. Simply add the parameter “response_format=json” to the querystring of any of your API calls and you’ll get a JSON response. To that end, we’ve updated our documentation to include sample responses in both XML and JSON.

  We’ve also generally revamped our documentation to improve both formatting and content. Reading through the old documentation, we realized that lots of things were not quite as clear as they could have been and we apologize for that. We think you’ll find the new docs a lot easier to read and understand.

Lastly: don’t forget about our API contest, which ends tonight! Submit your apps while you still can!