KungPowThinking

Adobe launched Adobe Photoshop Express today. It’s a free web-based trimmed down version of Photoshop that requires Flash 9 and gives each user 2GB of online storage. I just signed up for my free account. The app is very polished, but occasionally slow. I am currently attempting to upload my first picture a 76k photo of me and my friend Jen outside of BLT Fish. It’s obviously not a large picture, but the upload took approximately 20 seconds. Pretty understandable if everyone is hammering it today, but I hope it gets much faster in the future.

My first impressions:

• The user experience seems solid. I’m a bit more than a novice at Photoshop, and I had no problems figuring out how to do basic common image manipulations in Express. The only complaint is that it seems to be unnecessarily sluggish in some areas, but that could be a product of the user experience feeling so much like a piece of software that my brain isn’t registering the standard Web limitations in the same way I would with other web-based applications.
• The design is polished and seems to be more closely aligned with Apple’s UI guidelines than Microsoft’s or Photoshop’s.
• When trying to access an external album on Facebook (they import from Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa) I had bit of a problem when I decided to cancel out of the process. The window to Facebook didn’t go away no matter how many times I clicked “Close” and I ended up having to refresh and log back in. I’m using the most recent version of Firefox.
• They’ve integrated some nice photo sharing features like email to friends, link to, and embed which are pretty standard on most photo sharing sites, but are nice to see in a photo manipulation tool. I might try them up once I upload a few more photos.
• In “view as table” mode it wasn’t initially obvious how to edit information about the photo (adding a caption for example), but once I figured out to just click on the blank space where a caption would have been it made sense. This is similar to editing a contact in Addressbook, something I’ve complained about for a long time.
• When creating my first album, the instructional text asked me to drag photos over to create an album. When I did, I was able to create an album, but the photo I dragged over wasn’t in it. Not sure if I did something wrong or the app is behaving oddly. The fact that there was no explanation for the unexpected behavior is not optimal.

Overall it’s a pleasant application experience, and a perfect use of Flex. I don’t take or share many photos, so it’s probably not something that I’ll use often. If I have the time, I might google around to see what real photo nuts have to say about it.

Full review on C|Net that points out an interesting fact about the TOS and that users can’t print, upload directories, import contacts, or upload enormous files yet. In the comments a few people complained that the confirmation email took a long time to show up in their inboxes. I also noticed a slight delay in the confirmation email. Which makes me wonder why Adobe decided it was necessary that users have a verified email address, especially considering that they also include a captcha. Having to verify an email address is very disruptive to the sign up process, definitely reduces registration numbers, and the only gain is to ensure ability to contact users. It’s not as if having an email address is a prerequisite to owning a digital camera. I would have considered merely asking users to enter their email addresses twice and making the out of band verification process an aside.