Adobe has long been a trusted and widely used name within the photography world. Recently, Adobe unveiled its cloud-based Carousel photo service. Carousel aims to make sharing, organizing, and snapping photographs easier, and it achieves all three of these things. Yet, Adobe is gaining some criticism for being behind the times.

In addition, Adobe might be asking consumers to pay too much for the new Carousel service. However, it’s hard to deny that what Adobe has created isn’t a great way to make sure that all of your photographs are easily accessible across many different devices. So, what is Adobe Carousel exactly? Here’s a first look.

Carousel Explained

In a word, Adobe Carousel is organization. Adobe has taken the mess out of storing photographs on numerous devices, and being forced to transport photographs from one device to another through a tired and tedious method. Instead, Carousel allows users to snap photographs, and then send these photographs to a number of devices including iPads, iPhones, and MacBooks. Did you notice that all of these devices are iOS based? Well, that’s because Adobe is working with Apple on this one.

Adobe has mentioned that the Carousel service will be available for Windows and Android within the near future, though no launch date has been set. In addition to providing a simple way to spread photographs across a number of different platforms, Adobe makes it possible to create shared photograph folders. This will help you, for example, share a photograph that you’ve just taken with anyone who subscribes to your folder. Alternately, you can make sure that all the folders you create are private. To recap, Carousel lets you spread all photographs across all iOS devices that you own, share these photographs with anyone instantly, and edit photographs simply.

The Criticism

So, why is a product that sounds so innovative and unique gaining a ton of criticism? Aside from the fact that critics like to, well, criticize, Carousel comes with a very high price – a price that many consumers are not willing to pay. How much will Carousel cost you? Adobe has stated that Carousel will cost $60 per year ($6 per month) until January. Once that new year date has passed, users can expect to sped up to $100 per year or $10 per month.

Now, you might be thinking: “wait a minute, there are plenty of photo services that allow me to do the same thing for free.” If this thought has crossed your mind, you are not mistaken. There are other photo services that allow you to synch and share photos. But, Adobe claims that the editing features included with Carousel are unique, and that this service is better than the others that currently exist.

Is this true? You’ll have to give Carousel a spin to find out – if you want to fork over $6 per month, that is. You can take comfort in the fact that the actual Carousel app is free, but this does little to ease the pain of such a high price. If you want to find out more about Carousel, or look at the video that Adobe has prepared, go ahead and head to Adobe’s website.