Social media man­agers keen to keep up with the lat­est devel­op­ments in social tech­nol­o­gy will be inter­est­ed to see that New York-based pho­to-edit­ing start­up Aviary has hit a major mile­stone. Its plat­form has now been used to edit no few­er than 10 bil­lion photos.

70 mil­lion active month­ly users and climbing

Most tech-savvy social media man­agers would prob­a­bly agree that shar­ing pho­tos has become a major, if not the major, means of social com­mu­ni­ca­tion in the mobile era. But if we’re going to share pho­tos, most of us want to share great pho­tos, and for too many of us, we can’t seem to get above aver­age. That’s where Aviary comes to the res­cue: offer­ing its own brand­ed apps, it not only gives one’s more under­whelm­ing snaps the wow fac­tor, its soft­ware devel­op­ment kit (SDK) lets devel­op­ers add pho­to-edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties to their web­sites or app in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Found­ed in 2007, anoth­er mea­sure of its grow­ing suc­cess can be seen in the fact that it’s now inte­grat­ed with over 7,000 part­ner apps, includ­ing Square­space, Pic Stitch and Tan­go. Not only that, but its SDK has been down­loaded in no few­er than 143 coun­ties, and it’s reach­ing over 70 mil­lion active users every month. Giv­en that, unlike Insta­gram, Aviary isn’t a con­sumer pho­to app, most social media man­agers would con­cede that these fig­ures are pret­ty darned impressive.

Pho­tos as lin­gua franca

A quote from the com­pa­ny blog puts Aviary’s mis­sion very clearly:

“As we look for­ward, what most excit­ing is the fact that a new visu­al lin­gua fran­ca has emerged. Unques­tion­ably, pho­tos have become the com­mu­ni­ca­tion lan­guage of the glob­al mobile gen­er­a­tion. We are long past the point when pho­to edit­ing was just about turn­ing an aver­age pic­ture into a good one. Pho­to edit­ing is now about enhanc­ing visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion between bil­lions of peo­ple across the plan­et, in a way that embod­ies the full rich­ness of emo­tions, feel­ings and inspiration.”

Com­ment­ing on the recent $2 mil­lion debt round Aviary raised last year, CEO Tobias Pegg said that the firm want­ed to accel­er­ate a cou­ple of ini­tia­tives in 2014 (specif­i­cal­ly, Aviary’s brand­ed con­tent mod­el and its plans for inter­na­tion­al expan­sion). Exist­ing investors stepped into the breach quick­ly and, as far as Pegg is con­cerned, “It was the best solu­tion all round.”