Viral Image Sharing Platform Imgur Releases Sweeping API Update With an Eye Toward Commercial Use

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Dec 10, 2012) - Imgur, the fastest growing image sharing platform on the web, today introduces a massive overhaul to its API that gives web, desktop, and mobile developers an easy way to leverage Imgur's hosting and image distribution infrastructure for their own image-based apps. Developers can now build their own image-based apps, and rely on Imgur's proven infrastructure to power them.

Imgur is dedicated to creating the fastest, most reliable infrastructure possible. Imgur has grown and scaled its business rapidly, and now delivers well over 1B images to the Internet every day. Alongside its own growth, Imgur has seen a trend among web and mobile application developers building apps around the user community's insatiable interest in image sharing.

The convergence of Imgur's massive infrastructure with the sudden uptick in mobile apps has spurred the company's development of a commercial API for developers. Imgur has issued over 10,000 API keys to date, and developers have built tools and applications that range from desktop image uploaders to stand-alone mobile applications.

Imgur currently hosts all images for the Stack Exchange Network, a fast growing network of 92 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. Imgur has been in partnership with them since early 2011. The team points out that businesses of all sizes have the potential to gain in both performance and cost savings by choosing to use a provider that is focused on hosting and distributing images compared to standard web hosting companies.

Features in the new Imgur API include the following:

• It will be simple to log users in through 3^rd party applications via OAuth2 integration.
• Developers can now access all major site functionality including new features released in the recent site upgrade including: Image uploads to accounts and to the user submitted Gallery, account management, album management, voting, and commenting / replies.
• Commercial use has now been standardized and is available for developers of all sizes.

In an early example of the power of its API, Imgur has partnered with Mashape to drive the company's commercial billing management. This new version supports full commercial use at scale (unlimited uploads) and provides several pricing plans that can support small, medium and enterprise-level applications.

"Imgur's infrastructure was built to support uploading and sharing images on a massive scale because that's the nature of our business," said Alan Schaaf, Founder and CEO of Imgur. "We're now simply opening up that existing platform to other developers so they can leverage what we've built to support their own applications. We've always focused first on what's best for the Imgur community, and we think this is a great move for our developer community and for Imgurians at large."

"Building our image hosting business alongside our image sharing community means we're looking at the long term goal to be sustainable, and not reliant on any single revenue stream," added Schaaf.

To try the newest API, go to api.imgur.com.

tl;dr Imgur API update may be the best yet!

About Imgur
Known as The Simple Image Sharer, Imgur provides a fast and easy service for sharing images with the Internet. The company offers free image hosting, paid Pro subscriptions, and a robust API. The site also features the Imgur Gallery, a real time collection of the most popular images being circulated on the Internet.

Founder, Alan Schaaf, launched Imgur in February of 2009 when he was a junior at Ohio University. The site immediately gained favor with users of social media sites and online communities due to its ease of use, anonymous uploads and unlimited bandwidth restrictions.

Imgur is profitable and has not taken any funding. To try Imgur, visit imgur.com.