Except for a very nice “lite” version of Photoshop suitable for prosumers, Adobe has been strangely absent from the digital photography revolution. On Thursday they’ll be entering the market with Adobe Photoshop Album, an iPhoto-like application whose poorly-chosen name (it should’ve been “Adobe Album” or even “Adobe Photoalbum”) is already causing confusion — InfoWorld’s blurb on Album is titled “Adobe to offer Photoshop to consumers”.

Album does the usual organize/touch up/share stuff. Its breakthrough feature, according to the News.com story? You can assign “tags” to photos, and then search by those tags. Whoa! That’s such a great feature that I’ll travel back in time and tell every developer of photo album software that they should support metadata. <travelling back in time> Okay, done.

Apparently deciding that it can’t compete with iPhoto, Album is Windows-only. It will cost $50 and be available in February. | Adobe Photoshop Album | Associated Press story | InfoWorld story | News.com story