All aboard the Carousel

'Tablets and smartphones are changing people's workflows - we wanted to create something that allows you to use these as part of your workflow and always have access to the images, whichever device you decide to use.'

'There are a lot of people with huge catalogues of images - perhaps tens of thousands of photos, in the main on their hard drive or some kind of backup. It's very hard to connect and get access to all of these on your tablet or smartphone. It's also as a matter of fact difficult to share a large library of images. And, when you get on to your mobile device, there's a very different user experience. That can be a real barrier to productivity and causes a lot of frustration.'

'Nevertheless although we've tried to make it easy to use, we haven't dumbed-down the experience - we've taken our imaging processing innovation for desktop computers and optimized it for mobile devices.' And he is insistent that corners haven't been cut to accommodate the less powerful processors used in mobile devices. 'It runs then, even on phones,' he says.

Initially the service will only be available on Mac desktop machines or recent Apple iOS devices however other versions are coming, Quek says: 'In 2012 there will be customers for Windows and Android. The key thing is that it feels like you're using the same app in each environment, because in substance you are.'

Quek is keen to stress that Carousel isn't exactly designed for off-line working however it's clear that the intermittent nature of mobile connectivity has been considered in its design. 'The device you're working on will cache thumbnails of any image that has appeared in the track, and screen resolution proxy versions or any images you've looked at with the loupe. It will at the time pull down the full-size original version of any image you've edited.' These images remain cached until the devices' storage is needed for something else, whether that's newer images for Carousel or a movie downloaded from iTunes. This caching does mean you can continue to work on images during you're not connected to the internet. 'As you re-connect, it will re-sync all your updates.'