Yesterday a lot of articles went out reporting that Adobe accidentally leaked their upcoming Project Nimbus to a small portion of Creative Cloud members.
Project Nimbus appears to be a next generation version of Lightroom where the photo library is cloud based. A monthly subscription would get you access to the software and 1TB of cloud storage would be included for free.
The software would do some cool machine learning stuff that Lightroom currently does not do like being able to identify objects in photos and automatically tag them.
Looking around on the internet most of the reactions have been negative. People complaining they do not always have access to the internet or that their library is to large to store in the cloud.
Personally I have never particularly liked Lightroom. I find it to be incredibly slow and I hate the navigating the user interface. For my work I remain faithful to the perfect combination of Photo Mechanic and Photoshop. Only resorting to using Lightroom to store and catalog personal photos I take with my DSLR cameras. I am however very curious about Project Nimbus as it could be an ideal replacement of Lightroom for me allowing personal photos taken with my DSLR to be on all my devices just like the photos I take on my iPhone.
It’s also worth mentioning that this whole Project Nimbus story makes me think about how much of a head start Apple and to an extent Google have on Adobe here. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world are using iCloud Photo Library. I’m sure plenty of them paying for extra storage. There is machine learning photo analysis in place. All that Apple is missing is to really beef up the editing features to match those of a full featured RAW editor. I don’t think it they are very interested in competing with Adobe in this space, at least not on the pro-prosumer end. However it really is right there for the taking.
If you are interested in reading more about Project Nimbus check out the article on Peta Pixel.