Adobe announced yesterday that the company is planning to take the popular image editing software online within six months. This free version will not contain all of the professional functionality of the standalone application, but will instead offer a more simple subset in order to cater to a wider audience. Adobe plans to generate money from advertising revenue.
Will this become as widely used as their desktop application? Probably not. However, it is a good way to cater to those who already have the ability to do image editing in the desktop version, but who may not have access to it at work or on the road. I’d say this is a wise choice, as the market is quickly shifting to web-capable applications and Adobe is being left in the dust.
The main annoyance that I foresee with this product is the necessity to upload images in order to manipulate them, then download the resulting image. To me, this would be quite a pain, and will probably cause me to use the open source GIMP program instead (which I have already begun to make use of).
[via CNet News]
Tags: Adobe, Photoshop
