Adobe to Shut down Photoshop.com, forced migration to Revel

Sad but true, photoshop.com is closing down. The companion site to the Photoshop express app found on iOS and Android is being moved to a new (read old) service called Adobe Revel, which existed as a Cloud service sometime back.

Adobe's Photoshop may have dominated picture editing for a long time but of late, with busloads of new aspirants to the image doctoring found on mobile devices, there is little need for Photoshop for many beginners and old time die hards unless they were working on a particular kind of web graphic.

Photoshop.com wasn't user friendly and the UX stank. It was also slow as it grappled with large files. That said, not many people used it as frequently.

For those of us who use photoshop.com as a Cloud service, it didn't quite do the trick thanks in part to the wide choices of cloud services. You could upload an image file to any of the popular sharing service or for that matter, store them on Box.net or Dropbox with equal ease. What's more, pictures shot on iOS devices could not upload in the background as it didn't have true multi-tasking capabilities (which is even now a problem).

Photoshop.com's only hope was really on desktop uploads, which unfortunately is not nearly as popular as mobile uploads.

Adobe's hope was really in subscriptions, which Adobe Revel hopes you'd be willing to part with 6 bucks a month for such a service. This sort of pricing is nothing short of ridiculous. Storing only JPEG files at such a price even though it is an unlimited service is shooting yourself in the foot. Adobe has carefully avoided PNG files as an upload to save on storage space and that said, you are better off starting an image sharing account with Flickr.com for a cheaper price. Even 500px.com offers a cheaper entry level subscription than Adobe.

And to add insult to injury, the desktop app for Adobe's new Revel service only runs on iOS and Mac OSX 10.7, making all your older hardware totally obsolete. Forget Android, Windows and Chrome browsers, Adobe fucked it all up for the sake of Apple.

Adobe fails to understand that Apple is the enemy and they are not even at a "frienemie" level at best. By going to bed with your enemy, you are only hoping that you'd be tossed some scraps at the end. Good Luck Adobe!