As a photographer in the digital age, software is as important to me as camera bodies, lenses and flashguns. Without the ability to process the information collected by the millions of photosites embedded the sensors of my cameras, my photos would, if you’ll pardon the pun, never see the light of day. Hardware handles the photons but it is software that puts the picture (via a little Greek) into photography.

Despite its importance, software rarely excites me in the same way as a new piece of kit can. Software today is at a stage where you can do pretty much all that you want or need to do with a photograph with the range of programmes already available.

Technological advances in hardware however, have kept on pushing boundaries. What can now be achieved with a digital camera would have been unthinkable only five or six years ago thanks to the likes of the the Nikon D3 and its astonishing high ISO performance, the Leica M9 finally a full frame digital rangefinder worthy of the famous red dot, the Canon 5D Mark II and its full frame HD Video capability, or FujiFilm’s fantastic X100, the only camera to combine a truly compact body with a DSLR sized sensor and a usable optical viewfinder.

My lusting has therefore been focused purely on rumours, announcements and launches of hardware over the past few years.

Until now.

Today, Adobe announced something called Carousel, an application that connects handheld devices such as your iPhone or iPad and your desk computer or laptop with your Lightroom photo library. ‘So what?’ I hear you cry. You may well ask, the concept of cloud access and storage is not new, nor have we been short of grand announcements of new developments in this area, what with Apple getting very excited about its own iCloud.

What sets Carousel apart is that it seems, on first impressions, to offer a Lightroom interface on your iDevice, allowing you to not only browse your entire photo library no matter what (compatible) device you’re using, but doing away with manual synching of devices and the worry about storage limitation on your iPad. Not only that, but Adobe claims that Carousel uses ‘the same powerful photo-processing technology as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.’

What this means to me as a working photographer who almost lives in Lightroom is that now, no matter that I may not be at home or in the office, I have access to the original files of all my work, yet with the same ability to adjust, process and send them on. Not only that, I should be able to tether my camera and shoot straight into Lightroom, process it on location and then send it on to a client or picture library to upload it to my website. All of this is, of course, an option now, but not without the need for bulky, expensive laptops with duplicated folders of images or cumbersome external drives, and convoluted workarounds.

An iPad takes up very little room in a kit bag and is so versatile that it justified its existence there well before this announcement. Adobe CArousel would seem to have cemented its place in the starting line-up.

It all sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Well, I suspect that it is. There are two Achilles heels that continually hobble any kind of cloud sharing application: storage charges and access.

First impressions are that Adobe Carousel is keenly priced (about £40/year or £4/month) but these prices are ‘starting from’ and with no indication as to where they might end up either. I have almost 40,000 photos in Lightroom, each one averaging about 12MB, that’s pushing 500GB worth in total. Given previous cloud storage offerings I would expect storage matching that kind of requirement to not come cheaply, if it’s available at all.

Access is going to be an issue on a number of counts.

What’s the point in having your entire photo library available in the ether if you can’t get online in the first place? Only last month I was without any internet connection at all for two weeks when I was on holiday in North Norfolk.

Then there’s the cost of access. 36 12MB raw files from my D3 (the equivalent of a roll of film in olden money) would be over 40% of my 1GB monthly data roaming limit on my current tariff. I’ve already shot over 1,000 images this month and we’re only just a third of the way through.

Of course, there are simple ways around some of these issues, such as creating a separate Lightroom catalogue or two just for the images you’d want access to, but these tend to dilute the appeal of the application.

So, while I’m tremendously excited by the potential of Adobe Carousel, I’ll hold final judgement until we’ve just what its capabilities and pricing structure are.

Adobe Carousel is expected to be launched later this month for Apple OS and iOS. Android and other operating system compatibility is expected early next year. See the official Adobe Carousel page for further details.