Adobe Launches Image Hosting Platform

Adobe Systems (ADBE) has launched Photoshop Express, an online service for organizing, editing, and sharing images. Stacey at GigaOm notes that the launch provides "the first big test of Adobe's custom-built hosting infrastructure."

Interestingly, Photoshop Express seems to be running entirely under SSL encryption (https URLs), which tends to add network overhead. That strikes me as a little unusual for a service hosting large files, and the current image hosting market leaders, Photobucket and Flickr, run without SSL. But the service seems snappy, so the Adobe infrastructure seems to have plenty of horsepower to handle launch traffic.

GigaOm spoke with Adobe spokesman Geoff Baum, who declined to offer detail on the company's web hosting infrastructure, but said it "was entirely separate from Adobe's internal IT, and that it was built to be reliable and to scale for many users." It will certainly need to scale, given that Photobucket has 61 million users, with Flickr housing a slighly smaller but nonetheless massive user base.