> One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it.
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Remarkably, they didn't even need vibe coding to drive their software into the toilet. Their decline started long before AI started writing code for us.
A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.
Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop
But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe
With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.
Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.
A tangent, but for full clean removals of apps in MacOS (because I'm old-school and despite having plenty of GBs of storage, I hate the idea of dregs lying around) I've had success with AppCleaner[0] and Pearcleaner[1].
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
Affinity, mentioned in the article, was acquired by Canva and had its entire UI redone to work just like Photoshop. It's also entirely free with no gotchas.
It actually used to be paid. I paid for Affinity Designer when it came out first, then Affinity Photo. I didn’t pay for the publishing software since I was too deep into TeX. But at that time they promised that they would never become subscription software like Adobe and that message was part of the reason I bought it. I liked and still like perpetual licenses.
Since you've got Photoshop muscle memory but you're no longer a heavy user, have you considered Photopea[1]? It's very similar to PS in terms of UI, and even has the same keyboard shortcuts, so you'll feel right at home. At least more "at home" compared to Pixelmator, IMO.
I'm still amazed about the quality and responsiveness of this web tool compared to the real Photoshop.
Just starting Photoshop CC is longer than opening Photopea + a quick edit + export.
This software is rotting, was trying to edit frames of a gif this week and the previews are just broken in the timeline on Mac, literally had to boot up my PC, sign in which required restarting photoshop 3 times it just straight up closed itself each part of the process (once to sign out, once to sign in and once to actually use it signed in). Luckily the timeline still works on Windows but completely broken on MacOS so if you're Mac only you can no longer use Photoshop to remove frames from a gif and who knows what other software you should use instead for that thanks to Photoshop monoculture.
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2
V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
Eh, using resolve for photo editing seems a bit like using blender for video editing. It can be done, and it isn't that bad, but there are so many better options
BMD just added their Lightroom-competitor to resolve studio. It’s pretty new so I imagine it is not as feature rich as Lightroom, but could be worth looking at currently and I’m sure it’ll improve
World would be in a better place if GIMP hadn't ever existed, the existence of GIMP is part of why we don't have an actual viable alternative. Constant claims of "good enough", 20+ years to implement adjustment layers after dismissing their value for many years a team that doesn't really care at all about it.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
I share the sentiment, a lot of open source alternatives can't decide whether they want to be a replacement, a professional tool, a beginner user-friendly tool or just a playground for software devs. GIMP is awkwardly in the middle and has been stuck for a long time, it never met expectations, but became the default answer to any questions involving photoshop alternatives.
GIMP is very good if you never touch photoshop. It seems using photoshop for any significant amount of time ties you to that software, much like how using emacs for any amount of time ties you to emacs
After ~30 years of Photoshop, I now use Acorn for things where pixel-perfect editing matters and Affinity for everything else. I miss absolutely nothing.
I did an insane amount of pixel-perfect editing in Acorn 1.0 free trial when I was a kid in 2007, always with the shareware banner blocking part of the canvas
Photoshop on mac has gotten worse over time. On the latest version its possible to trigger multiple save-as dialogs. Also it has this focus-stealing issue where it drags me back to the desktop I have it running on when I'm working in another desktop.
> It turned out that my subscription, which had been going since 2013, was on an “Annual Paid Monthly” plan. Even though I was getting billed monthly, I couldn’t actually cancel any time I wanted.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)
Okay so this pisses me off because our graphic design team was having constant problems with Photoshop being unable to open assets. They were stored on the corporate fileserver. I opened a ticket with Adobe support who informed that they didn't support opening assets directly from a NAS. They only supported local copy and Creative Cloud sync. That was the official line. Solution I came up with was to restart SMB daemon every morning. Which released the lock on the files.
So Adobe went from supporting SMB/AFS file sharing to pushing customers to use their dropbox like sync service. And then abandoning even that to be replaced with...?
Holy moly.
But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe
Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)
Pearcleaner is multi-functional; AppCleaner just sits in the background looking for app bundles to appear in the recycle bin.
[0] https://appcleaner.macupdate.com/ [1] https://github.com/alienator88/Pearcleaner
Though, it's success does make me wonder if a GIMP based editor with a similar interface would work well
https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp
How is this sustainable for a for-profit entity? How do they pay the bills/developers?
[1] https://www.photopea.com/
Does anyone happen to know if there is a similarly good alternative to Lightroom?
Also, Davinci Resolve has added photo editing functionality since 2 V21 iirc, but it’s not a drop-in replacement. It’s Davinci Resolve though, so expect to be blown away.
Not that you should have to do that, I'm just letting you know that you can so they don't get a fee from you.
How do you feel about it? i know people were sometimes quite critical, it has different workflow than PS, but it seems it gets the job done.
If GIMP had never existed maybe the Blender team or someone else who actually has passion for the problem would have made the Linux image editor and we'd be in such a better place.
This has indeed things like "!!1! MALWARE !!!!" written all over it.
I've been wondering for a while what happens if you just block the transactions on your credit card. (Can't test it myself because I'm not an adobe customer and never will be)