Revel, Adobe’s cloud-based application for iOS and OS X to store photos online and have them synced across devices, was updated today to include several new features and Retina graphics for the new iPad. As I outlined in my original review of the app (when Revel was still called Carousel), Revel stands as a mix between Apple’s Photo Stream – a feature of iCloud that automatically transmits new photos taken on iOS devices to the cloud – and more traditional lightweight photo editors; with options to quickly crop and rotate photos, filters, and adjustments, Revel allows users to store, sync, and edit photos across devices by paying a monthly or yearly fee.
Revel, however, wasn’t perfect in its first version, and Adobe promised they would add more functionalities for better file management – admittedly limited and overly simplified in Revel 1.0 – to enhance the capabilities of the software. Revel, in fact, simply provided a stream of photos in chronological order, without enabling users to sort these photos in events, simply giving them an option to create and share “carousels”. Aside from supporting the Retina display, today’s major update to Revel brings several new options to organize, browse, and share photos imported from an iOS device’s photo library.
Revel 1.2 lets you organize photos in events. When photos are imported and organized by day, Revel displays an icon next to the date’s label to set an event name, or a different date and time. While in edit mode, this button allows you to quickly select or deselect photos from a specific day. Retaining the same horizontally-scrolling interface, Revel 1.2 also adds shortcuts to view the favorite items from a set, and browse a day in a more convenient grid mode that you can activate with a button, or by swiping to the right across a day’s photos. Photos can be assigned to an event, and photos from a different day – Revel is still largely based on a chronological visualization of your photo library – can be merged into an existing event. While updating the app with new events for my old photos, I noticed that, whilst graphics and images look better on the Retina display, photo thumbnails look slightly pixellated.
Viewing modes have been revamped as well. You can now view all photos, events by date or name, or photos that haven’t been uploaded yet. On the sharing’s side, you can now select multiple photos at once, and choose to share them, save them back to the Camera Roll, or delete them.
While still lacking several of the functionalities seen in desktop photo managers like iPhoto (you can’t sort people’s faces, view locations, and create albums), Revel offers a very intuitive and reliable sync mechanism that makes sure all your photos and changes are always kept in sync across devices, something even Apple’s own iPhoto doesn’t do yet. Revel 1.2 is a free download on the App Store, with monthly subscriptions starting at $5.99 through iTunes. Adobe Revel 1.2 has also been released for OS X, and it’s available on the Mac App Store.
