Lightroom User Woes....

I'm sure that there aren't many on here that may be gungo Lr users on here. Certainly not compared to Ai and/or Ps.

Now I wasn't aware of this as I don't use Lr at all, even though I have it.

If I read everything correctly, Adobe has dropped support for Google API (stopped paying their license fee), so users have to get their own. That I don't think is all that new of an issue, I just wasn't aware of it until now.

And more recently, they stopped paying for for their facial recognition license and that has affected those that had the perpetual license of Lr v6, which was the last one for the perpetual(which is misleading in this context as it was never really totally perpetual) license, but had that feature. It does seem to be a simple date verification, so maybe rolling back system clock may get around that (keeping the computer online is going to make that a tedious task).

Now, I will say this, due to the EULA (and this is pro forma for all EULAs), Adobe is in their right to do this, certainly with outdated software that they no longer support, but even with their latest and greatest, any update can "kill" any feature with or without advance notice to users. That's the joy of being "bleeding edge" on any software.

I have to wonder what other 3rd party licenses that Adobe would drop that would render people's older software that still have it connected to the internet?

Now, yes, it's older software and should be up to date, yadda yadda yadda. That's true, but keep in mind, this can (and does happen, even with these issues, but also with Dolby, which is what triggered the "rolling release" model in the first place) on the CC versions as well. Always be careful of what features "you" use in Adobe that are specifically 3rd party licensed. Make sure that there are ways to "finalize" it in a copy of the file (always try to have a master file that features are live) to make it as "portable" as it possibly can be.

Not always possible, but just something to think about.

 

Facial recognition is the big one and I think that happened around Dec 1st.

However, people that had the perpetual LR v6, their program was crashing, regardless if they were using that module or not. That's the biggest thing. That it even affected the usability of a perpetually licensed product. Now, I am not a lawyer, but in my mind, I would have thought that since that license fee was sent by the end customer (when they bought the perpetual license) and that would have been sent from Adobe to the OEM that they licensed from, so that v6 should have already been taken care of. Anything from x-1 on backward should have been OK, but that isn't the case. And of course, since Adobe doesn't support v6 anymore (and I would say rightly so), they are going to say want to use Lr (regardless if you use that functionality or not) going to need to pay your lb of flesh. That to me is the biggest take away.

People that are on the rolling release CC versions, that's just something that one should just be willing to expect, but when it's on the perpetual license (and we aren't even talking about, Adobe taking down the activation server and a user tried to reactivate their license), that to me is a little underhanded. But again, it may be legal (after all the EULA does give them the notice to change things with little to no notice what so ever), but that to me is just another reason to try not to be solely dependent on one software vendor.