Adobe's ID servers crash and take the entire creative community down with them.

SteveC

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Glad it's back online for you. This is the reason I still use Lightroom Classic offline.

Is that still obtainable?

Honestly what I need is a way to tag/index photographs, more than anything else--and I want strict control over what it indexes (i.e., I don't want it searching some areas of my system, where I am already set up in a special way that makes sense there). I don't mind paying for the "near perfect" piece of software, but I'd need to be able to try it out to make that assessment. (And I do NOT want a subscription. Period.) I rarely do any sort of post-processing other than cropping.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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I missed it too, if it was ever a thing that impacted users like me who only log a workstation on when required and store everything they need locally. Sure I sync stuff over various clouds but come on people have we learnt nothing? I would never trust storage of my stuff to somebody else and I am a nothing, people with teams of creatives and deadlines must be insane to be relying on any single storage solution.
 
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I missed it too, if it was ever a thing that impacted users like me who only log a workstation on when required and store everything they need locally. Sure I sync stuff over various clouds but come on people have we learnt nothing? I would never trust storage of my stuff to somebody else and I am a nothing, people with teams of creatives and deadlines must be insane to be relying on any single storage solution.
It was pretty hard to avoid on any computer connected to the net. At least as far as I could tell. As soon as you launched an app and it pinged the ID server to check your license status it shut down all adobe apps on your computer. Even of you subsequently went off line. I could run my laptop because I temporarily shut off my network and then disabled it's wireless connection. Anyone in a production environment that used a shared adobe network went dark instantly. Adobe always said that you'd have a thirty day grace period if there was an issue with the ID servers but apparently they didn't count on the ID server going rogue and shutting everybody down. No files were lost as far as I know. I don't use cloud storage. But you couldn't access any of adobe shared networks or run any local adobe apps for hours.

Probably a bigger issue for designers and graphic artists who use shared mark-up libraries than individual photographers.

In my case I wasn't using any network resources. I shut down because adobe's ID server sent an electronic kill switch to all of my local apps. There really is no excuse for that and it's exactly what many of us were concerned about with this model.
 
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Jan 29, 2011
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Yet another reason not to RENT your software.....

;)
That is entirely false and just illustrates a clear misunderstanding, that is seemingly all pervasive, on how the software works and what it does regarding ’phone home’.

Pre subscription the software did exactly the same thing, it called Adobe on startup and verified the software was genuine and legitimately installed on that specific computer, indeed Adobe were lazy because exactly the same ‘crack’ was used to circumvent the legitimate phone home protocol for pre and post ‘rental‘ versions.

In other words, depending on the specifics of the incident, outright purchase software is just as susceptible to an issue like this as lease software.
 
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SteveC

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That is entirely false and just illustrates a clear misunderstanding, that is seemingly all pervasive, on how the software works and what it does regarding ’phone home’.

Pre subscription the software did exactly the same thing, it called Adobe on startup and verified the software was genuine and legitimately installed on that specific computer, indeed Adobe were lazy because exactly the same ‘crack’ was used to circumvent the legitimate phone home protocol for pre and post ‘rental‘ versions.

In other words, depending on the specifics of the incident, outright purchase software is just as susceptible to an issue like this as lease software.

I have a generalized distrust of software that MUST "phone home" before it will operate, and this is just one added thing.

Now, I don't want ANY Adobe product on my system. It certainly won't want to work on my home network, which is airgapped.
 
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This is about the reliability of a network service that professionals need to make a living. Not tin-foil-hat conspiracy nonsense. If you can't access networks like this in the gig/work-at-home world then you can't function as a collaborative professional. Simple as that.

If that's not your world and you don't rely on these products to make a living that's fine but for countless professional these are essential tools.

IMO, even as a hobbyist, if you aren't using Lightroom as a DAM that's your loss because it's a pretty solid package that nothing else can really touch.
 
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cayenne

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This is about the reliability of a network service that professionals need to make a living. Not tin-foil-hat conspiracy nonsense. If you can't access networks like this in the gig/work-at-home world then you can't function as a collaborative professional. Simple as that.

If that's not your world and you don't rely on these products to make a living that's fine but for countless professional these are essential tools.

IMO, even as a hobbyist, if you aren't using Lightroom as a DAM that's your loss because it's a pretty solid package that nothing else can really touch.

So far I've replaced LR with ON1 Raw....and have been very happy with the results.
I've replaced PS with Affinity Photo....again, happy so far....and have added Affinity Designer to the mix and will do Affinity Publisher too while it's 50% off....pretty nice suite of tools.....so far.

With adobe going to the rental model...this gave room and incentive to have some real viable challengers to Adobe products and it is proving to be a real possibility of viable options these days.
 
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So far I've replaced LR with ON1 Raw....and have been very happy with the results.
I've replaced PS with Affinity Photo....again, happy so far....and have added Affinity Designer to the mix and will do Affinity Publisher too while it's 50% off....pretty nice suite of tools.....so far.

With adobe going to the rental model...this gave room and incentive to have some real viable challengers to Adobe products and it is proving to be a real possibility of viable options these days.
Personally I think the rental thing is overblown but If you found a solution you prefer that's cool. Choice is better for everyone. I pay Adobe a modest annual amount for a service that is essential to my business. I'm too set in my ways to change something as core to my workflow as Photoshop and I haven't seen anything that works any where near as well as Lightroom for managing files.

Even after the aggressive purging I've done over the last few years my main catalog still has over 200,000 images. Every image I've ever taken, film and digital, all in one manageable, keyword-able, database that has one of the better Raw converters built in. If that isn't worth $100 a year I don't know what would be.

I'm not going to get in a snit and use a product that I think is inferior just because I'm unhappy with Adobe. I can't think of any time in the last 30 years that I've been particularly happy with Adobe. The cloud model aggravated me for a while but I got over it. It is what it is. I see it as fair value at less than $10 a month, a fraction of what I pay for Netflix, I can't worry about it.

I just want it to be reliable and not shut me down in the middle of a project.
 
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unfocused

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So far I've replaced LR with ON1 Raw....and have been very happy with the results.
I've replaced PS with Affinity Photo....again, happy so far....and have added Affinity Designer to the mix and will do Affinity Publisher too while it's 50% off....pretty nice suite of tools.....so far.

With adobe going to the rental model...this gave room and incentive to have some real viable challengers to Adobe products and it is proving to be a real possibility of viable options these days.
I purchased ON1 because I wanted access to some specific features. (On 1 Resize, which used to be genuine fractals is the best resizing program available in my opinion and I occasionally need ON 1's portrait software) But, there is no way I would replace Adobe with On 1.

The reality is that if you want to keep On 1 current, you need to pay for regular updates. And, in your case, it sounds like you are paying for two software programs from two companies, when you could have it all from Adobe. Yes you can let the software get out of date, but with Adobe I know that I'm always getting the latest version with consistent and useful upgrades for the industry standard and in my view, best overall software available. I also know that 5-10 years down the road, I'll still be able to open and edit an image created in an Adobe program.

Oh, and by the way, no matter what software you are using, you are renting it.
 
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cayenne

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I purchased ON1 because I wanted access to some specific features. (On 1 Resize, which used to be genuine fractals is the best resizing program available in my opinion and I occasionally need ON 1's portrait software) But, there is no way I would replace Adobe with On 1.

The reality is that if you want to keep On 1 current, you need to pay for regular updates. And, in your case, it sounds like you are paying for two software programs from two companies, when you could have it all from Adobe. Yes you can let the software get out of date, but with Adobe I know that I'm always getting the latest version with consistent and useful upgrades for the industry standard and in my view, best overall software available. I also know that 5-10 years down the road, I'll still be able to open and edit an image created in an Adobe program.

Oh, and by the way, no matter what software you are using, you are renting it.

Well, I think back to my Adobe days....I didn't need to buy the upgraded version of PS or LR every year.

There simply wasn't that much they did or features they added that were do or die for me or my work flows.

I would buy every few years IF they got a feature I really needed, or if the OS I used might not run the old ones (say with OS X and I think soon possibly windows not running 32 bit programs anymore)....

But no, I never bought each time. I need a compelling reason to have the "latest and greatest" in some things....and frankly, I rarely see the end al be all feature that comes out that I need really.

I don't need or use a cloud storage feature.

IN many ways PS still suffers from being built and run on such an OLD code base, having to support many tools that are old but they won't be phased out.
In this manner I find that Affinity Photo is superior, especially in SPEED due to it being a new code base with a more modern and faster engine.

Other Adobe products need improvement in this department too, I think (and I may be wrong) that Premier still uses way too much CPU and not enough GPU and misses out on speed, or perhaps it doesn't multi-thread well/. Please forgive me on that one, I don't know the exact complaints , but I read about this a year or so ago..when comparing Premier vs FCPX and Davinci Resolve.

Right now On1 RAW is like $50....
On1 Prices

These are covid half prices I think....but upgrades if you CHOOSE to do them, are usually this half price or near it.
And you do get free updates on it throughout the year...

I found I bought the Affinity Suite (photo, designer and soon to get publisher)....they keep giving free updates so far in perpetuity.....they are also selling half price.

Right nw Affinity Photo is $25.....
Affinity PHoto Pricing

And there are free trials...so, if while you have time during the whole lockdown thing, you might give them a try.


With AP I find many of the keyboard shortcuts are the same, and you can customize others as needed.
There is a slight learning curve as with any new software...they do have some things I'd do in PS with a different name and different in the work flow that I'd expect and while rare, I DO come across some things I wish they'd do or do different. I will say, however that both companies are very responsive to user requests, etc....I even had ON1 send me a in house pre-prod version that addressed a need I had to use till they had the official update out a few months later.

I was impressed by that.

One thing you ended with:
"I also know that 5-10 years down the road, I'll still be able to open and edit an image created in an Adobe program."

Well, I dunno about that. If you quit paying your rent, or their ID servers go down....you won't be able to open and edit those images with an Adobe program.
They can hold them hostage, willfully or not.

But like you said....choices ARE a great thing to have....

C
 
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