quasify

Photoshop Express, a free web-based (& Flash 9 driven) photo editing and gallery service was released today. This program lets the user make minor modifications to a photo either hosted by Adobe (each user has 2GB of storage to work with) or on Facebook, in a Picasa web album or on Photobucket.

Some qualms based on an hour worth of playing with this:

• Overall, it’s antisocial. There’s no commenting support or obvious way to tag anything.
• There’s no support for Flickr so we’re stuck with Preloadr.
• Embedding options are limited. And by limited I mean there are none, so you get what you get – 256 pixels max dimension.
• It’s slow. Clicking ‘Edit Photo’ can lead to extended (or indefinite) waits while ‘Preparing Photo to Edit’.
• See an interesting photo in another user’s gallery? Don’t expect to be able to find a direct URL to it or embed it.
• Don’t expect to be able to copy or paste any text, anywhere from this site. For instance, it is possible to see another user’s main url, but it’s not a link (so can’t be right-clicked and copied), and highlighting and copy/pasting is non-functional. So if you want to get back somewhere you’d have to transcribe that url by hand somewhere.

The issues I have with Photoshop Express are for the most part problems of presentation rather than function. If you think of this more of just an editing tool than as an actual photo sharing platform on par with Flickr or Picasa (or hell, Dropshots), Photoshop Express may have a chance to be useful rather than just shiny. Granted that all the edits you can make here are of the type one could otherwise quickly make in the free desktop Picasa, but once your photos are already online, this may be the best option for tweaking. If you want to see the test album I created with some hevelonian shots that’s here. The original on which the purple facade above was based is here.