Every year around this time, I like to pause and take a moment to reflect on the past 12 months and think about the successes and lessons learned while planning ahead for the next 365 days. It’s been a whirlwind of a year, but we’ve certainly got a lot to celebrate – and much more to look forward to in 2013!

Photobucket marked 2012 by transforming the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling. As the world’s leading consumer service dedicated to preserving and sharing the entire photo and video lifecycle, we are committed to being the one place where you can keep all your memories – and do literally anything you want with them, whether that’s emailing an album link, embedding in your blog, creating a social scrapbook or even designing traditional photo gifts for giving to friends and family.

Numbers-wise, we continued to keep our momentum up, thanks to our very active, very loyal base of users. Thanks to you, we’re still the largest dedicated photo and video site, hosting more than 10 billion images from 100 million registered members, who upload more than four million images and videos per day from the Web and connected digital devices. That’s a lot of memories entrusted to us, and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. In fact, our customer support team took to social media this year in full force via a dedicated Twitter handle and Facebook team to respond to your questions, comments and concerns.

Most recently, we celebrated the launch of Photobucket Stories with a $25,000 Life’s an Adventure contest, in which we received more than 4,700 entries, thanks to an active and engaged community (1M+ strong on Facebook!). It was a close race, with more than 475,000 of you taking to social media to get in on the action and cast your vote for your favorites by entering, commenting, liking and sharing them. In the end, though, Summer Brennan was crowned our champ with her touching story about her adventures in horse training titled, “Amado: Befriending a Wild Mustang.”

As evidenced in Summer’s tale, Photobucket Stories provides users with an easy new way to combine photos and videos into complete, sharable narratives – with photos, video, text, social collaboration and sharing capabilities, and more (see another great example here). It’s something we’ve worked very hard on and were proud to include on the heels of our release of the all-new beta Photobucket user experience this year. As a result, the site has seen significant increases in user engagement, as Stories continues to help us transform the act of photosharing into the art of storytelling.

Another exciting development that combined the power of Stories with the popularity of holiday cheer was our promotion with Twentieth Century Fox’s family movie comedy, PARENTAL GUIDANCE. This partnership marked our first launch of a marketing campaign including the Photobucket “Stories” platform. PARENTAL GUIDANCE Stories includes an inside look at both families – “old school” and “new school” – featured in the film, along with their respective (and humorous!) generational differences.

Along with those developments, we announced an exciting partnership with Windows 8 as a photography app available in the new Windows Store to help users encourage and enhance their creativity. We also took some time out to focus on the little things with our dedicated PB Loves gallery, which is a collection of things that make the Photobucket staff happy, whether it’s a favorite photograph, funny snapshots or moment that’s been memorialized – all put together to keep inspiring you.

So, as you can see, we’ve had quite the year, and we’re excited to carry on the positive momentum into the next year and beyond, with plans for more product enhancements, mobile updates and launches, additions in functionality and features, new and novel tools…and much, much more.

A few sneak peeks? As we continue to evolve the all-new Photobucket site, we’ve added all the features that linkers love, plus we’ll also be rolling out an improved editor and evolving the new Plus service to better suit your needs. Stay tuned for more details soon!

Thank you again for your support this past year, and we look forward to celebrating and sharing more milestones with you in 2013.

-Tom