Photoshop Express set to change the universe

OK, perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement.  But it is really cool.  I briefly reviewed Photoshop Express for Computerworld and came away reeling at the possibilities.  While we all knew this application was coming down the pipe, Adobe made great use of Flash and delivered a very polished product. 

Facebook(!!), Picasa and Photobucket direct access shows the amazing possibilities this web application has.  No doubt, more services will be coming soon.   If you can give Photoshop Express access to your blog images directory, you could do all of your image editing inline – without having to upload or download between edits.  How about Google documents or presentations?  Editing photos inside the web browser would make those services all the more valuable.  Oh, and move to another computer and your 2 GB library goes with you.

The downside?  Adobe and Apple aren’t getting along too well these days.  Normally, Apple and Adobe products play very well together.  However, since this is a Flash-based Web application it won’t work on the iPod Touch or iPhone.  Also, your iPhoto library isn’t browsable since Apple, for whatever reason, decided to put all of the original photos in a Package which isn’t accessible by the browser (needed for Photoshop Express).  If you want to access your iPhotos, you need to export them from iPhoto.  Lame

Hopefully someone is working on an iPhoto plugin at this very moment that allows uploading of photos to the Photoshop Express storage.  The other work round would be to upload your photos to Facebook, Picasa, or Photobucket using the current plugins and editing in Photoshop Express from there.

Have fun!