![]() ![]() Adobe is not alone (#2): other features than pure photo cloud storage are increasingly the competitive differentiators.Flickr sells ads, Google Photos will no doubt sell ads in the future, Photobucket sells photo output products, Amazon sells Amazon Prime subscriptions that include Photo Prime storage, and Microsoft sells Office 365 subscriptions that include OneDrive storage. Adobe is not alone (#1): photo cloud storage is increasingly a cost-leader for selling other products or services.Rather than centrally storing all the user’s photos (“aggregation” services, see our recent Photos at your Fingertips report), Adobe uses the cloud as a glue to sync photo files for editing in Adobe’s tools to and from different desktop or mobile devices. Adobe realigned its cloud services to sell subscriptions to their creative tools.With large cloud storage providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Flickr, and Google driving the prices down, there is not much hope for a reversal to healthier subscription margins for pure photo cloud storage solutions. Dealing with small margins is not an area that Adobe wants to or most likely even could play in. Storage margins were small and have become razor-thin.Alas, the company decided four years later that this didn’t make financial sense. With its photo-related brand recognition, Adobe was in a unique position to become the vendor that consumers could trust for storing their lifetime photos. At that time most cloud storage providers were primarily “any file” storage providers, with few solutions on the market that provided photo-specific features and interfaces (such as photo timelines independent of file-folder structures or the ability to filter photos for specific photo metadata). When Adobe launched Revel in 2011, offering consumers photo storage made a lot of sense. Adobe’s cloud is “just” the glue that enables users to edit their files on any device with any Adobe product. Adobe has decided it isn’t in the photo storage business after all.On desktop computers, users can manually upload their photos. The mobile apps provide auto upload functionality so that each photo taken on a smartphone is automatically stored in the cloud. Revel offers storage access through mobile apps, desktop software and the web. Adobe has tried for four years, without putting a lot of development and marketing resources behind it, to make Revel the trusted photo cloud storage solution of choice.Users are encouraged to subscribe instead to Adobe’s $9.99/month Creative Cloud Photography plan (this plan includes access to Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC as well as several mobile apps, but the included storage is limited to just 2 GB – Revel Premium cost $5.99/month for unlimited storage). Users are offered a tool to download their photos in case they don’t have them stored on their local drives. Today, Adobe notified its Revel users that their photo storage service is going to be discontinued as of February 23 next year.
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