Adobe Project Nimbus Leaked: This is ‘Lightroom in the Cloud’

At its MAX conference in 2016, Adobe teased Project Nimbus, a new cloud-based Lightroom-style photo editor that distils complex photo editing features into simpler tools. An internal version of Project Nimbus leaked this week, giving us a peek at what Adobe is working on.

The French website MacGeneration reports that an “Internal Only” version of Project Nimbus was apparently accidentally made available to a number of Creative Cloud subscribers.

The error was quickly fixed, and Adobe acknowledged the glitch, saying: “That morning, we shared Project Nimbus by mistake with a small group of Creative Cloud customers.”

The idea of Project Nimbus is that it’s a photo editor in which your photos and edits are stored in the cloud, allowing you to easily go back and forth between desktop and mobile devices while reviewing and editing your photos. It’s a cloud-native, RAW-capable, non-destructive, photo editor and organizer that focuses on a clean user experience.

Based on the leaked software, it seems that Adobe is planning to give each Nimbus user 1TB of cloud storage, a huge jump from the 20GB currently offered to Creative Cloud users.

Nimbus will be able to automatically recognize what photos contain, allowing you to search through photos with automatically generated keywords/tags. This can also make it easy to label and organize for photographers working in fields such as stock photography. Want to find photos of water or trees? Just search for those terms.

A search for “water”
A search for “tree.”

And Nimbus is much simpler than Lightroom. Instead of multiple modules, tools, and features, photo editing is done in a single view that has some of the most used features and options available in the side panel. This interface is more similar to Lightroom for iPad than Lightroom for Desktop.

A closer look at the editing sliders. Labels in French.

Adobe has said that a beta version of Nimbus will be released sometime in 2017, so we’ll likely be seeing a much clearer picture of what the software can do soon. Stay tuned.

(via MacGeneration via 9to5Mac)


Image credits: All screenshots via MacGeneration

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