When you take a digital photo, you can see the result right away on the camera's LCD. However, there's still a delay in getting the photos from the camera to your computer, where you could view them in better detail and edit them.

Now, that delay is going away. Apple's iCloud Photo Stream and Adobe's Carousel services both take photos you capture with an iPhone — the camera of choice for an increasing number of people — and make the photos available on all your devices almost immediately.

(If you own an Eye-Fi wireless memory card, it's also possible to bypass the import process and transmit photos from other digital cameras to the computer.)

iCloud Photo Stream: When you sign up for a free iCloud account (or convert an existing MobileMe account to iCloud), you can enable the Photo Stream feature to copy photos among all your devices (www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html).

Any new photo you capture using an iPhone, iPad 2 or camera-equipped iPod touch is saved to the Camera Roll, and also added to the Photo Stream. (The same applies to photos you import to an iPad using the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit.)

Then, the photo is automatically copied to all of your Photo Stream-enabled devices, which includes iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac or the Pictures folder under Windows Vista or Windows 7. In seconds (depending on your Internet connection) the photo can be on your computer.

If you own an Apple TV, you can enable Photo Stream to view your photos on an HD television. That's a great way to share photos with family nearby, instead of crowding folks around an iPad or computer.

iCloud stores 30 days' worth of images, and keeps the most recent 1,000 images in the Photo Stream on iOS devices; everything is stored on the computer. However, you can't delete items from the Photo Stream (so you're stuck with shots where your finger obscured the lens).

In addition to the inability to remove photos from the stream, though, the service is geared just for sharing photos among your devices; you can't point someone to a Web page to view a photo, for example, the way you could with the old MobileMe Gallery.

Adobe Carousel: Adobe's offering fills in some of the gaps. The basic idea of Adobe Carousel (www.adobe.com/products/carousel.html) is the same: Add photos to one device and they appear on all others. (Currently, the software is limited to Mac OS X and iOS devices, but it's expected to expand to Microsoft Windows and Android devices in 2012.)

Using the free iOS app (which runs on both models of iPad, fourth-generation iPod touch, and iPhone 3GS and later models), you can add photos you capture or those from the Photos library. On the Mac, manually add any photo files to the free application.

In any of those locations, you can view photos, mark favorites, share to popular sites, and edit them; the editing tools include preset looks as well as adjustment sliders. Edits are also nondestructive, so you can return to the original at any time.

My favorite feature of Carousel, however, is the ability to share a carousel (in the spirit of old slide projectors, hence the app's name) with up to five people. Those friends can make edits and mark favorites, too, without stepping on your work. I love this capability: After a trip, my wife can choose her favorites from my photos independently from my own picks.

The downside to Carousel is the pricing scheme: After a 30-day trial period, introductory pricing costs $5.99 per month, or $59.99 per year; starting January 2012, the regular price of $9.99 per month, or $99.99 per year, goes into effect. For that cost, you can import as many photos as you like into five photo carousels, and share each carousel with up to five people. One upside is that anyone you share a carousel with can use the service free.

I don't object to paying for the service, but in light of iCloud's free offering, the pricing seems steep.

But my main complaint is that Carousel is, so far, its own walled service. It doesn't integrate with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Photoshop Elements, so if you already use an application to manage your photo library, you need to pull images out to share them on Carousel.

However, Carousel is also a new, 1.0 product; I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually becomes integrated with those other programs.

Still, I've found that the near-ubiquity offered by Carousel and Photo Stream is addictive. The convenience is irresistible, and now I want it to happen for every photo I take, no matter what camera I use.

Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to carlsoncolumn@mac.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.