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Adobe Launches Carousel App and Photo Service for Mac and iOS
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So for $59 ($99 after the first year) they will store all 40GB and growing of my photo library... and synch it will all my devices (iPhone, iPad, MBA, and iMac)? If so, I am SOLD.
If they have some hidden limit on how many gigs I can use, then its a flop.
If they have some hidden limit on how many gigs I can use, then its a flop.
No RAW uploading, no thank you!
Flickr lets me upload RAW, right from Lightroom. Yes I know, Flickr stores the files as high res jpgs (so jpgs is all I ever will get back), but at least I don't have to do the conversion on my end before uploading.
I'm currently paying $25/year to Flickr for unlimited uploads of full res photos. I'd be willing to pay double that if Carousel stored my RAW files as RAW and offered better organization tools (i.e., albums, sorting by EXIF data). But $100/year? No way! I'll stick with Flickr.
Flickr lets me upload RAW, right from Lightroom. Yes I know, Flickr stores the files as high res jpgs (so jpgs is all I ever will get back), but at least I don't have to do the conversion on my end before uploading.
I'm currently paying $25/year to Flickr for unlimited uploads of full res photos. I'd be willing to pay double that if Carousel stored my RAW files as RAW and offered better organization tools (i.e., albums, sorting by EXIF data). But $100/year? No way! I'll stick with Flickr.
I'm a bit surprised at all the negative comments and some of the seeming hate. Especially since most are commenting without even trying it first.
Theres a thirty day free trial so I decided to test it out.
I first tried the iPhone app as I think that's the primary user Adobe is targeting with this service and app.
The app in and of itself is not bad. First you import the pictures you want. You don't have to import your entire library of pictures if you don't want to. And yes it's a batch import, not one at a time.
It organizes the pictures by date and I see no way of changing that. There's no way to edit the name of pictures either.
There are however some very nice editing tools. You add one of about 15 special effects, adjust contrast, brightness, temperature, exposure, tint, highlights, shadows, vibrance and clarity. You can also crop flip and straighten the horizon aspect. All very easy and intuitive.
Once done editing you don't have to do anything for the edited image to be synced. It's done automatically. You can also share by email, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
You can share an entire Carousel with up to five users but the must have the Carousel app installed on their devices. They can however add to or edit the Carousel you share with them. A nice feature but it's unclear if you both need to have a subscription.
The Mac app is identical to the iOS app and this is where it starts to fall short. I would have thought that Adobe would do some kind of integration with Lightroom if you have it installed on your Mac. I saw no way of being able to work with the two cohesively. You can of course edit images in Lightroom and then import them into Carousel but that's not what I think most would want to in terms of work flow.
While the iOS app is nice, it doesn't really do anything special that other apps don't already do like Luminance or Photo Studio or even Camera+ or Camera 360.
There is potential here but Carousel is needs more tools and a better Mac experience before it can be a stand out.
Then of course is the question of price. I use Smugmug so I am willing to pay for an online photo service. The problem with Adobe Carousel is that there is no web interface or app to allow you to share a link or if you wanted to showcase your talents. To be fair that's not what Carousel was built for. But with the introduction of iCloud it has become an also ran.
Carousel's time was two years ago. Then it could have been a viable solution. Today though it doesn't make sense to spend any money on a service that users get for free.
Please excuse any grammatical or spelling errors
Theres a thirty day free trial so I decided to test it out.
I first tried the iPhone app as I think that's the primary user Adobe is targeting with this service and app.
The app in and of itself is not bad. First you import the pictures you want. You don't have to import your entire library of pictures if you don't want to. And yes it's a batch import, not one at a time.
It organizes the pictures by date and I see no way of changing that. There's no way to edit the name of pictures either.
There are however some very nice editing tools. You add one of about 15 special effects, adjust contrast, brightness, temperature, exposure, tint, highlights, shadows, vibrance and clarity. You can also crop flip and straighten the horizon aspect. All very easy and intuitive.
Once done editing you don't have to do anything for the edited image to be synced. It's done automatically. You can also share by email, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
You can share an entire Carousel with up to five users but the must have the Carousel app installed on their devices. They can however add to or edit the Carousel you share with them. A nice feature but it's unclear if you both need to have a subscription.
The Mac app is identical to the iOS app and this is where it starts to fall short. I would have thought that Adobe would do some kind of integration with Lightroom if you have it installed on your Mac. I saw no way of being able to work with the two cohesively. You can of course edit images in Lightroom and then import them into Carousel but that's not what I think most would want to in terms of work flow.
While the iOS app is nice, it doesn't really do anything special that other apps don't already do like Luminance or Photo Studio or even Camera+ or Camera 360.
There is potential here but Carousel is needs more tools and a better Mac experience before it can be a stand out.
Then of course is the question of price. I use Smugmug so I am willing to pay for an online photo service. The problem with Adobe Carousel is that there is no web interface or app to allow you to share a link or if you wanted to showcase your talents. To be fair that's not what Carousel was built for. But with the introduction of iCloud it has become an also ran.
Carousel's time was two years ago. Then it could have been a viable solution. Today though it doesn't make sense to spend any money on a service that users get for free.
Please excuse any grammatical or spelling errors
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Thanks for the evaluation of Carousel. I've been researching which photo site I would like to use post-MM photo gallery. Looks like I'll select SmugMug - the $60/yr version looks right for my needs.
Off topic: Notice you have Blogger as part of your ID. Could you share your thoughts on what might be a good blogging site to start with? At this point Typepad looks good to me - as does WordPress. This will be a site I use to post my thoughts on news of interest to a specific community -- but, not a professional blog. Having the ability to post sidebar information -- links to PDF's, etc. would be useful. I'd like to be able to post from my iPad/iPhone too -- little confused on what the ideal blogging app would be for those devices. I have not done any HTML coding - but I have been a programmer in my past life - so, I could pick up basics.
Off topic: Notice you have Blogger as part of your ID. Could you share your thoughts on what might be a good blogging site to start with? At this point Typepad looks good to me - as does WordPress. This will be a site I use to post my thoughts on news of interest to a specific community -- but, not a professional blog. Having the ability to post sidebar information -- links to PDF's, etc. would be useful. I'd like to be able to post from my iPad/iPhone too -- little confused on what the ideal blogging app would be for those devices. I have not done any HTML coding - but I have been a programmer in my past life - so, I could pick up basics.
According to the adobe site, they just support JPEGs:
"You can import a virtually unlimited number of JPEG files, and install Adobe Carousel apps on as many of your compatible devices as you want."
Too bad they don't support RAW formats. Could potentially be interesting otherwise.
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One potential perk of Carousel (and maybe why they say it is like Lightroom) is that it supports non-destructive editing:
"Experiment freely knowing Carousel always preserves your original photo."
I haven't played with a lot of the iOS photo editing apps, but this is a nice feature if it is unique.
LOL, I think I will just use Snapseed and one of the many free cloud services for this "convenience", Adobe. Wow, what a subscription cost. Crazy. It's on the scale of a prosumer app for photo editing (not a "Photoshop" with CMYK support for publishing, etc), so I guess this would be an Adobe Lightroom with cloud support. But this will cost you more than that after just two years, in a time when sizable cloud storage is free or cheap. And honestly, Lightroom looks quite a bit more capable than this on top of that.
I may be wrong, but it might only work with JPG and not RAW, which is useless for professionals.
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You could use an online storage service, up to 7GB free, or pay something if you need extra space. Converting to JPG is is your choice but you souldn't have to pay for that. And conversion happens on the fly with any program like iphoto, lightroom or aperture. I'm not sure Flickr is a good solution.
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You could use an online storage service, up to 7GB free, or pay something if you need extra space. Converting to JPG is is your choice but you souldn't have to pay for that. And conversion happens on the fly with any program like iphoto, lightroom or aperture. I'm not sure Flickr is a good solution.