There are so many modern software products out there which uses cloud-computing to allow you to work from anywhere there is a network connection. You can use your PC, phone, or laptop for this.

Enter Adobe

But now, it appears as if Lightroom by Adobe Systems, among the most popular programs for photo-editing, is going to use the cloud more too. Today, the Lightroom is locked to one PC, but a recent job posting hints at them working on loosening the link.

In the posting, they have written that they are working on building the next generation of device-connected, cloud-first product for people who are interested in photography. They added that to help with this, Lightroom was looking for desktop software engineers to help them enhance and extend their photography platform.

A Lightroom which is cloud first will be great news for photographers. It will allow you to send your main machine for repairs while protecting your photo catalogs against equipment loss, theft, or fire and making it easy for you to retrieve particular shots while you are traveling without having to carry around an external drive.

Road Blocks

But the post also said how hard it was going to be to move their complex software to the cloud. In 2012, Adobe moved all its creative software meant for photographers, illustrators, and moviemakers into a new subscription model known as the Creative Cloud. You can get access to all these features by paying just $50 a month. $10 a month will get you access to Lightroom and Photoshop. But Adobe has very slowly added the cloud part to this Creative Cloud.

First, they added the ability to sync files; then they added the ability to share libraries with design elements, then they added the ability of browsing stock photos which you may need to buy from inside programs such as Photoshop.

For Lightroom, you could synchronize photos between your mobile devices and PC. This allows you to edit pictures on your phone and move images you’ve captured with your phone to your PC. There’s a web interface for these synchronized photos also which is improving steadily.

Fundamentally though, you will still be working mostly on your PC and your master catalog of photographs. The Lightroom sync from today is very useful, but the program is attacked to the one-PC origins it has.

Hiring Talent

Adobe did not commented beyond saying that it is hiring for the Lightroom team. But, Tom Hogarty, the director for product management at Lightroom, had earlier said the company wanted to embrace cloud computing for Lightroom.

There is a very good reason why this hasn’t been done sooner too. Video and photo files are quite large and slow to transfer over the network. Even when you’re using a super fast network, with a 1 gigabit per second speed, you will need at least 4 seconds to download 30 MB photo files. Lightroom users usually deal with dozens of pictures at one time. Panoramas, videos, or HDR images will only be bigger.