Free Photoshop Express Is a Mixed Picture

Photoshop Express allows users to edit photos within a Web browser.

Photoshop Express's other issues, however, can be pinned only on its creators.

One: Even after you've beamed your shots up to the Adobe site, using this program can involve notable, distracting waits. Opening a photo for editing -- which you'll need to do just to zoom into it -- took five to seven seconds, even on a fast connection at the office. Saving edits to a photo took as long as 30 seconds.

Two: Photoshop Express provides only a few links to the photo-sharing sites that most people already use. By providing your user name and password, you can bring photos in and out of Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa -- but not such popular competitors as Flickr or Kodak Gallery, each of which has its own Web-based editing tools. Flickr's, in particular, exceeds Adobe's in simplicity and speed.

At the moment, Photoshop Express's greatest utility seems to be as a Facebook accessory.

Three: For now, you can't print anything, except by printing an entire browser window. That may not be a problem for users who have transcended paper, but many others would rather order 8-by-10 blowups of their best shots -- an option that Adobe says won't come for a few months.

Four: This site suffers from way too many glitches, even for something labeled a beta. Some hide in fine print: Photoshop Express's terms of service allow Adobe to reuse your photos at will, an excess of sloppy lawyering that the company says it will correct. Others are more obvious, such as the way it kept losing captions I'd added to some photos. After I shipped an album of pictures over to Facebook, the captions that did survive wound up on the wrong shots, while the pictures had been shuffled into a seemingly random order.

Adobe has the right idea in getting into the Web-applications game. But this initial entry doesn't offer enough to make people leave competing services. And without collaboration features that might let you and a friend cooperate online in labeling and editing pictures, it provides an incomplete answer to the question of why you'd want to edit photos in a Web browser at all.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/