Comments on: Introducing Adobe Carousel

By: Andrew Bowman

Andrew Bowman — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:52:07 +0000

Here’s how I see this fitting into a professional photographer’s workflow.

I’m on location, shooting. I take the card from my camera, plug it into my laptop (since the iPad has no way to accept a memory card). Next, I import the photos into a Lightroom catalog and export them all as jpegs. Now I upload those jpegs to my carousel cloud. Now, after about twenty minutes of work (assuming a full day’s shooting), I can whip out my sexy iPad and show it to the client.

I really don’t see how this solves any problem. The problem is that I want all the editing power of the Adobe Raw Converter without needing to carry my laptop to ever job site. With Carousel, I get neither of those things. I still need my laptop so I can get my photos from my camera to the cloud, so what’s the point of having an iPad? It’s just one more thing to carry around that doesn’t provide any additional utility. Carousel doesn’t do anything Lightroom doesn’t do, and I still need Lightroom to use Carousel. I guess I just don’t understand how this helps a professional photographer.

Seriously. I want Lightroom on my Android tablet. Just give it already. I want all the editing power of Lightroom without needing my laptop. That means it can’t be on the iPad, because the iPad doesn’t have a card reader, or any way to connect one.

By: Julienne

Julienne — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:04:53 +0000

How will Carousel fit into a photographer’s workflow? Currently I use lightroom, then rate, tag, and edit them images. I got all excited about Carousel, but then found out that it has no integration with the Adobe system I already use – this baffles me. Why have multiple desktop image catalogues cloggin up your time and disk space? I would have thought that a critical feature would be to connect with Lightroom, an excellent Adobe product that creates a catalogue and already serves to organize your images.

Please tell me there are plans to merge the two? Otherwise I don’t understand these decisions.

By: johnsmith

johnsmith — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:32:25 +0000

I think this app looks like a great start at making it much easier to leave your computer at home and just bring your iPad to do the basic photo organization with. I would happily pay the monthly fee but only:
1. if raw photos are supported
2. if there is a way to sync back to LR on the mac
1 seems to be on the way and I hope that 2 is at least being thought about. I like using LR so – if carousel is based on LR why complicate things by making people have to have another app (and another copy of their photos) on their computer?

By: johnsmith

johnsmith — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:26:05 +0000

It is not really true that iOs doesn’t allow apps to delete photos. iOs doesn’t allow apps to delete photos from the main photo library. I have never understood why photosmith does not use an approach more like filterstorm with regards to importing photos. You basically import from the system wide photo folder into the app and from there the app has permission to do what it wants with the photos. Not only that it is a much cleaner system – I can make sure only the photos that I want to work with later on lightroom are in the photosmith – not all of the snaps that I have taken for use with evernote or another app and only the photos I want to show people – post processing – are in the system wide photo library.

By: john francis

john francis — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:41:43 +0000

Ive just downloaded this. It looks good works fine but no RAW support which is 98% of my images and i was hoping it would allow me to update my LR3 catalogue remotely for editing and managing – keywords etc. ill use it for 30 days but maybe the above functions are not what this is designed for?

By: Coco Johnson

Coco Johnson — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:51:45 +0000

What happened to release by end of September.? Nothing at all.
seems very odd and unprofessional on Adobe’s behalf

By: Mark Levison

Mark Levison — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:38:51 +0000

I would use this in a heartbeat if it helped solve the wife acceptance factor of Lightroom. I love and use lightroom. My wife just wants access to our photos. Please solve and I will give Adobe money :-)

So far the best option is LiveMesh and sidecar files.

Cheers
Mark Levison

By: Petra

Petra — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:28:25 +0000

I´m curious about the metadata editing capabilities and couldn´t find about that yet. Will there be the whole set – flags, stars, colours, keywords plus the IPTC dataset?

By: HTCexplorer.com

HTCexplorer.com — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 11:19:05 +0000

This looks absolutely wicked! From what you’ve said, could you expand on one point? You say that we can give access to families, friends etc. but can we also set it up to give out a link that expires after X amount of time?

By: JT

JT — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 16:54:49 +0000

Please, please expose an API for it

By: John I. Clark

John I. Clark — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:37:29 +0000

Oh, and RAW support, but that’s coming, right?

[Yes, raw support is coming. --J.]

By: John I. Clark

John I. Clark — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:36:46 +0000

Sure would be nice if this was NOT subscription-based, and also if it integrated directly with Lightroom.

As many above have stated, I’ll jump in with both feet if you can somehow fix both of those!

[So, regarding subscriptions, you want lots of online hosting plus multi-device sync, you just don't want to pay for it? (What/how *would* you pay to make all that work?) --J.]

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:15:04 +0000

I’ll be all over this once it integrates cleanly with Lightroom.

By: Falk Lumo

Falk Lumo — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:29:18 +0000

Kudos for Adobe being active in the photo cloud services business. With iCloud, SmugMug, Amazon etc. it is a highly competitive field and not Adobe’s core competence.

First of all, let me ask if I understand correctly?

Uploading a Terabytes of RAWs into Carousel would be 60-100$ a year? I ask because that’s a pretty good price (of course, the actual cost of storage for Adobe is lower; but then comes the transfer cost).

Or is there a hidden limit by saying only photos which all devices can sync which may mean 64GB and JPG?

My second question would be LR .lrcat file (an open source database file) and Carousel. Is Carousel meant to sync photos or .lrcat files? If the latter, will there be a better catalog sync algorithm in the future? Like multiple satellite lrcats syncing with a single master catalog?

By: Pete

Pete — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:21:54 +0000

Now this sounds interesting, and I’ll gladly sign up if :

- can I send my clients a somewhat protected or expiring link where they can download their set of photo’s that I’ve prepared for them ?
- can I disable people messing and adding photo’s to my carousel ?
- do corrections made in carousel get synced back to lightroom ?