Photonic sciences go from strength to strength and the journal has to keep up with these developments. In 2022, significant breakthroughs were made in laser fusion, fast progress in optical quantum computing and optical AI, and many other areas of optics. Photonics continues evolving and this journal must be here to cover all the advances.

In the past year, Advanced Photonics received its first Impact Factor and CiteScore, ranking 5^th out of 101 journals in the JCR Optics category.1 Submission numbers continued to rise steadily, if not dramatically. This is a good problem to have for our enthusiastic Editorial Board. We published a theme issue on Photonics in Thin Film Lithium Niobate, organized by Professor Siyuan Yu, covering most recent advances in this rapidly developing technological area. Traditional annual Editors-in-Chief best paper awards for the best original article and the best review published in the previous year were a difficult endeavour, given many competing brilliant articles. Our warmest congratulations to the winners: “Ultrawideband chromatic aberration-free meta-mirrors” and “Optical trapping with structured light: a review.” We continued publishing interviews with optics luminaries. In 2022, it was Sir Michael Berry, Xiang Zhang, Marko Lončar, and Naomi Halas, who shared their experiences with us. We are glad that our readers enjoy reading these interviews, which gives food for thought for early career researchers as well as everyone. We welcome suggestions from our readers about who they would like to be interviewed in 2023.

Probably you have seen and read the articles from the first two issues of our sibling journal Advanced Photonics Nexus launched in September 2022. The journal immediately attracted significant attention with many submissions, and as promised, we do our best to keep the publication time as short as possible.

The editors and publishers were very pleased to meet many of our authors and readers in 2022 during a buoyant conference season. Your feedback and suggestions are very much appreciated and will be acted upon. In addition to sponsoring and attending conferences, the first SPIE–CLP Conference on Advanced Photonics was organized in Zhejiang, China, in November 2022. Given the success of this conference, we are considering expanding this event. Please watch this space: www.advphoton.org.

This journal will always be here for optical scientists as they continue advancing photonics.