London, April 23rd 2008 - Blurb, the creative book publishing platform, today introduced a new Photobucket Slurper, available in the company’s bookmaking software, Blurb BookSmart™.  Built using Photobucket’s API, the Photobucket Slurper allows Photobucket’s nearly 40 million users* to connect to their Photobucket  accounts and slurp their full-resolution photos into BookSmart. Once in BookSmart, users can easily create their own Blurb book. Blurb enables anyone to affordably make, share, market, and sell bookstore-quality books.

“Photobucket users already have a ton of content stored online, and we’re making it easy for them to bring it offline into a real book,” said Eileen Gittins, founder and CEO of Blurb. “We have seen that there is a growing need for people to take this online content and create something tangible. Blurb books capture and reinforce people’s shared experiences and passions; we’re excited to see some awesome books coming from Photobucket people.”

To create a Blurb book, download  the free Blurb BookSmart™ software from the Blurb website. BookSmart runs on Mac or PC and offers a wide variety of book layouts created by professional book designers. People have complete control to add photos, art, text, blog content, or anything else – including slurped images form Photobucket, Flickr, Smugmug and Picasa.  

The Photobucket API enables companies, including Blurb, to create applications, such as the Photobucket Slurper, that let users access their Photobucket photos from environments outside Photobucket.com. Since the Photobucket API works on any device with an Internet connection, those environments might include other websites, web applications, desktop applications, browser plug-ins, mobile phones, home-entertainment systems, digital photo frames and digital cameras.

“Our mission at Photobucket has always been to give people the power to upload and share photos and videos -- whether on blogs, social networks, auction sites, or consumer devices,” said Alex Welch, president, Photobucket. “The broad release of our API offers new opportunities for people to illustrate their lives and share what they create with others.”

Coincident with the opening up of its API, Photobucket has launched an Application Gallery on its Web site where developers can showcase their products and users can find and download applications and discover devices that support the API. To view the Photobucket Application Gallery, visit: http://gallery.photobucket.com.

For more information about the Photobucket API, please visit http://developer.photobucket.com.