At Photoshop World this morning, Adobe announced Carousel, a new software initiative designed to provide access to your photographs everywhere, on (almost) every platform.
In the Photoshop World demo that introduced the program, Adobe showed acquisition from both an iPhone camera and from files from more traditional cameras brought from the desktop. Once images are in Carousel on one platform, they become available to you on any other platform you have (with some delay in building thumbnails and moving the full set of data over if you want to look at or manipulate the image directly). All edits, as in Lightroom, are non-destructive. The photos themselves live in the cloud, thus this is a subscription service (intro price is US$59.99 a year or US$5.99 a month, though the eventual price will be US$99.99 a year and US$9.99 a month; early adapters are price protected for three years).
But Carousel is more than just having access to all your photos on all your devices: it's really a social media platform. Your Carousels can be shared with others (and yes, you can have private and multiple public assets). Carousel can further share via Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Much more functionality is going to be unlocked in the future according to the product manager for Carousel, so I assume Google+, Flickr, and other connections will also appear. I couldn't get a clear answer as to whether Carousel is extendable by third party developers ala Lightroom, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
The interesting aspect of Adobe's photographic endeavors is just how many ways in which they're managing to package the same basic core engines into different (and interesting) products. The same raw conversion and image developing routines that sit under ACR (Photoshop) and Lightroom are also behind Carousel's manipulation controls.
Carousel will be available on the Apple platforms (Macintosh, iPad, and iPhone) in this month. Windows and Android are promised for first half of 2012. Since this is a subscription service, there is no extra charge for additional devices you wish to access Carousel through (i.e., you can have all your computers and portable devices active with Carousel for no extra cost).
Once again we have a Silicon Valley company understanding what users really want to be able to do with their photos (collect them in one place and access them anywhere with anything). The Japanese camera companies still don't seem to get the Internet-connected world of images, though many keep dabbling at the edges. Unfortunately, they get caught up in proprietary platforms and never get to the common solution in the middle. Then they get upset when companies like Facebook, Apple, and now Adobe fast become the new Kodaks of the world instead of them.
Three solutions for the camera companies:
- Make every possible camera users want and make sure they are enabled with every connection to where the user wants the photos (e.g. "send to Facebook, send to Carousel," etc.).
- Fully understand what users want to do with photos and become the primary hub for that (oops, Adobe just got there first). Build devices, conduits, and connections that feed the hub and pollinate from the hub.
- Just continue to do what they've been doing. Unfortunately, there will be 2.2 billion camera enabled devices sold this year, and less than 150 million of them are actually cameras. Oops, redux.
Now read the following story again and think about what Adobe is trying to do versus what Panasonic is trying to do.