Photo Editing Platform Aviary, Now With 50M Monthly Active Users, Goes Global With New Japan Office

Aviary, the photo editing platform that has become a developer darling through its straightforward ability to integrate into iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5 apps, has crossed a major milestone — and is aiming for even more growth.

Today the company is announcing that more than 50 million people used Aviary in the past month, giving it an effective monthly active user (MAU) base of 50 million across its own app, as well as in the implementations of Aviary partners such as Flickr. Aviary is also gearing up for its first international presence, with an office in Japan slated to open next month.

According to a blog post published today by Aviary’s new-ish CEO Tobias Peggs, that MAU figure represents 100 percent growth over the past six months alone. In all, he says, the Aviary platform has been used to edit more than 4 billion photos to date (up by a third from just early March.)

The upcoming opening of the New York City-based Aviary’s first international office in Tokyo, Japan, next month shows that the company isn’t content to rest on its laurels just yet. According to Peggs, Aviary has seen strong demand from the Asia region in general, so this will act as a foothold to grow further there. I’m told that Peggs himself will be heading out to Tokyo next month to work on staffing up the outpost.

In his blog post, he said:

“This year, we’ve seen huge demand from users and partners right across Asia. Partners are taking advantage of our localized SDK for photos and stickers, and are also working with us to create custom content for their users. We already have fantastic partnerships with companies like Mixi, one of the biggest social networks in Japan, so it makes perfect sense for Aviary to put feet on the street in Tokyo and start serving the region from there.”

For all the talk in recent years about photo sharing “fatigue” in the tech space, it’s clear that creating images and sharing them with other people is one of the activities that human beings gravitate towards throughout history. And it seems like technologies that help us do that in a smart and intuitive way will never go out of style — and likely continue to grow in value. Aviary will certainly be one to watch as it looks to expand its platform worldwide.