Digital photos are great for sharing, aren’t they? It’s so easy to email them, put them on Facebook, post them on dedicated photo websites like Flickr, and so on. The difficulty is managing all those images. What picture’s where? Is the final edit on Flickr or just your hard drive? Do the photos you snap with your phone exist elsewhere? And if you want to combine photos from several people—of a class reunion, for example—things get even more complicated.
That’s why Adobe designed a new application called Carousel that syncs photos across multiple devices so there’s no question about where you find a particular image. Carousel also uses the same interface on all of those devices; you don’t have to learn a new way of doing things if you’re browsing or editing on your iPad instead of your main computer. And it’s easy to share Carousel libraries with other people and even collaborate on photo editing.
That’s some good news about Carousel. The bad news, at least if you’re a pro photographer, is that Carousel is meant to be a consumer product. It can’t process RAW files, for example. Its non-destructive editing tools are based on the powerful image-processing engine beneath Lightroom and Camera Raw, but you can’t get at much of that power. You’re limited to presets called “Looks” and to some fine-tuning in the Adjustments area.
Still, Carousel could be a dream come true for many snap-happy folks, as long as they’re willing to pay $59.99 a year or $5.99 a month for the app and unlimited photo storage on a secure Adobe server. (That’s introductory pricing, by the way; on January 31, 2012, it goes up to $99.99 a year or $9.99 a month.)
Carousel’s early adopters will also need to be Mac and iOs users: on the desktop, OS X 10.7 (Lion) is required, and mobile support is limited to the iPhone 3GS/4, iPad 1/2, and iPod touch 4G. Windows and Android support will be available in 2012.
Once it comes out later this month, you can try out Carousel for free for 30 days. I recommend that you do, unless you’re satisfied with your current set-up or are one of the aforementioned photo professionals. In the demo I saw, Carousel’s thoughtful design eliminates a lot of potential headaches. For example, as you browse your library on a mobile device, Carousel won’t pull down a full-res version of a photo until you choose to edit it. Since your libraries are stored in the cloud, you don’t clog the relatively limited storage of a phone or tablet.
I also think that Carousel will improve. Adobe senior product marketing manager Chris Quek told me that while Carousel’s “v1 is as simple as possible, in later versions we’ll find out what’s really needed and add only that”. Adobe can roll out those improvements quickly thanks to the subscription model—no need to wait for the traditional revision cycle.
Keep your eye on Carousel. It’s going to be a fun ride.
This article was last modified on January 6, 2023
This article was first published on September 7, 2011
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