Stand-alone Lightroom – RIP

[WoodWorks]

So Adobe has made it official: they're killing the non-subscription version of Lightroom.

Adobe announces Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC (and it's the end for the standalone version) - sonyalpharumors

I'm not surprised. And though I depend on Adobe's CC version of Illustrator to make my living, as soon as I retire in a couple of years I'm going to let Adobe know exactly what they can do with their subscription model.

 

[roundball]

So Adobe has made it official: they're killing the non-subscription version of Lightroom.

Adobe announces Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic CC (and it's the end for the standalone version) - sonyalpharumors

I'm not surprised. And though I depend on Adobe's CC version of Illustrator to make my living, as soon as I retire in a couple of years I'm going to let Adobe know exactly what they can do with their subscription model.

To be sure I'm understanding...there's a comment that no more "camera support" will be added after 2017.

IR reports that Lightroom 6.13 will be released on October 26 with support for the Nikon D850 and no additional camera support will be added beyond 2017.

I assume they'll continue to provide ongoing normal software support for existing installations of LR for the foreseeable future wouldn't they, as most any software outfit does?

 

[WoodWorks]

I assume they'll continue to provide ongoing normal software support for existing installations of LR for the foreseeable future wouldn't they, as most any software outfit does?

Nope, the stand-alone version of Lightroom will be unsupported after 2017, i.e., no more bug-fixes, feature updates, tech-support, etc. And some day, after some OS update to your computer, it'll completely cease to function. Basically Adobe has pulled the plug, and it's been left to die. So if you want to continue using Lightroom, you'll eventually have to sign up for their subscription plan.

 

[roundball]

you'll eventually have to sign up for their subscription plan.

Won't happen for me...I refuse to be manipulated / controlled by companies like that just out of spite...and there are normally many other options available, or become available, to fill voids like that, etc.
Life goes right on without being "owned" by some company like Adobe

 

[Golfhacker27]

I hope that LR6 will hold up without updates or support for a few years.
I purchased it a couple of years ago and have been utterly happy with it, including ongoing updates (which I did not expect to get for purchasing stand-alone). A couple more years and I will consider that I had good value for money.

Really don’t understand their obsession with pushing everyone to monthly subscription. Subscription is only value if you want to cloud-store, and I believe that many people don’t.

Perhaps Adobe see what Microsoft have done with their Office suite of products. But there’s a diference : there are very limited alternatives for MS Office, whereas there are many for image processing.

Maybe Adobe will see that there remains a market for one-time purchase. If not, then I will be joining the exodus towards the alternatives.

 

[roundball]

IMO, the Obsession is: $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

 

[davect01]

I am curious where this will put Adobe in 5 years.

 

[WoodWorks]

I am curious where this will put Adobe in 5 years.

Probably rolling in dough. Their net income has quadrupled since they moved to their subscription scheme. So I doubt they see any downside at all to losing customers like us.

 

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Funny how people have gotten used to the monthly charges on so many things these days.
Leases on cars, instead of buying them outright.
Phones, TV, internet access, etc., all those monthly bills add up in a hurry.

I remember when we were building the DirecTv satellites and they were first going public. We thought it'd take a lot of customers to pay for just one satellite. Now that they've got their customer base and have paid off the sat's it's a total cash cow for them.

 

[roundball]

Ref Adobe: Assuming they don't do something completely stupid like Photobucket did and lock everybody's photos until they pay some new exorbitant monthly rate...and customers left Photobucket in droves.


My personal choice is I keep all originals local...only a few copies go to any hosting site (ie: Flickr).
I make a 100% full boot-able hard drive clone backup every week, goes in a house safe.
Monthly, I put a separate copy off site in my bank safe deposit box.

No "cloud" dependency / no exposure to my photos being lost / held hostage.
In addition, the full boot-able HD clones include all my PC software.
So if my main C-drive crashes, worst case is I only lose 7 days of activity.

Total control / total peace of mind.

 

[AlwaysOnAuto]

^^^I wish I were that disciplined to maintain a system like that.

 

[WoodWorks]

My personal choice is I keep all originals local...only a few copies go to any hosting site (ie: Flickr).

The only thing I ever put on the cloud are copies. All of my photos (and any other important files) reside right here on my Mac, and are backed up daily (and hourly) to a couple of external HDs. Does anyone really store sole copies of their important files in the cloud?

 

[roundball]

^^^I wish I were that disciplined to maintain a system like that.

Really nothing to the BU operation...there is up front expense to get started of course.
But to be honest, so much of daily life is now dependent on a PC ( or iPad, etc ) its far too risky not to do it...and the only other choice is to use a cloud where sooner or later, your information will be lost or hacked...not a question of 'if' it'll happen...only 'when' it'll happen.

The expense of 3-4 500GB solid state hard drives and $75 for Acronis True Image software.
Just plug in a spare empty HD, kick off Acronis, takes about 25 minutes.
I do mine when I'm getting ready to fix lunch or take a shower or something.
House could burn down or be broken into and laptop stolen.
No sweat...spare HD clones in the safe and safe deposit box.

 

[roundball]

The only thing I ever put on the cloud are copies. All of my photos (and any other important files) reside right here on my Mac, and are backed up daily (and hourly) to a couple of external HDs. Does anyone really store sole copies of their important files in the cloud?

I think the vast majority of people who have migrated away from PC's / Laptops which have internal HD storage...to iPhones & iPads which have no internal hard drives only have the cloud for their data storage.

 

[WoodWorks]

Well, that may be true for some. But my iPhone has 128GB of internal storage, and my iPad Pro has 64GB. So I've got plenty of room for any conceivable amount of photos and files that I need to keep on hand when I'm away from my Mac. And now with iOS 11, which finally has a file manager, there's even less reason for me to use any sort of cloud service for anything but copies.

 

[WNG]

Agreed. Moving to the 'cloud' based (mainframe) model means control of their IP better which cuts revenue loss from counterfeited copies of stand alone Adobe products.
That's why Microsoft had moved to 365. The other reason is that you truly only subscribe and no longer own and have no legal rights to the software. They keep 100% of the legal rights to do as they please to their subscriber base. The licensing is more draconian. They can pull the plug on you at will.
Plus, the added revenue of data mining all users of their personal data off their computers. (People need to dig into the EUA of software!)

People must do some diligence to realize there are alternatives. A large user base have become fed up with a lot of this. Thus MS Office has spurred the efforts of free office suites like LibreOffice and Apache Office. And Google's web 'office'. I don't even miss or use MS Office anymore. And if more firms adopted LibreOffice Suite, they wouldn't be held hostage to port their business to the cloud.

There will be more alternatives springing forth to fill the void. As the CC model also kills the 3rd party Lightroom/Photoshop plugin industry. You'll have to pay Adobe licensing to become a 3rd party plugin provider. 100% control over that now.

The personal concern I have is the ongoing privacy violations software firms feel they can do to end users. Realizing this is where the hidden money lies, more so than ever, spying on you is big business now. The cloud-based model means they can monitor ALL your activity patterns of your work, your systems and networks, and even non work related actions. The euphemism now to describe it is Telemetry. But the amount of collected data is alarming, as the roll out of Windows 10 revealed last year.
The efforts to further undermine privacy with Microsoft's latest Creators Update to Win10 is becoming a major concern. When your anti-virus/anti-spyware program returns a warning that your whole OS is spyware...and you should delete it immediately! Well...
Microsoft has also decided to treat the enduser as hostages like Adobe by dropping ALL support for Win7 and Win8(.1) for any current or future processor upgrade. Not even Windows updates to anti-virus definitions!
This is why it's so important to support alternatives. Linux running virtual machines of windows will handle all windows based apps! Supporting stand-alones like Gimp, Macphun Luminar, Capture-One, ON, etc.

This is the new model...they want to herd us like cattle.

Rant off!

 

[WestOkid]

Subscription services, information sharing, and eco-systems are the way companies ensure lasting revenue. "We" have all bought in one way or another.

Examples:

Apple - Apple was all about innovation, but no more. After they gained market share, just about everything is done to preserve the eco-system and lock you in. Hardware, software and services that only work with Apple. Forget about competing, just make it uncomfortable for you to leave. They even change people's vernacular by choosing to use arbitrary names vs established standards so their customers feel like fish out of water using other devices. Everything Apple does these days is about preserving eco-system, not innovation. See (lightning ports, Facetime, Apple pay, iTunes, Apple Music, iMessage, Airplay, etc). In the case of iMessage Apple had to be ordered by courts to provide a simple way for people to get their text messages upon switching from an iPhone to another brand. All messages from other iPhone users would to go to iMessage, which inexplicably can only be accessed by an Apple device. Meaning people would miss messages and blame the new device since this never happened when they had an iPhone. Guess what the customer did? Returned the "unreliable" device and re-purchased an iPhone. Locked in and they don't know it.

Google - Everything they do is about gathering and sharing information. They actually take a different approach than Apple, they will make all their services available and cheap to everyone and anyone to position themselves to capture and own your information.

Take Cable companies - The founding fathers of Subscription services. Remember when people thought cable was a fad? Remember cable-ready TVs and Cable cards? Hardware companies know where their bread is buttered and got rid of that stuff. Now all the services only work with equipment that you must rent monthly. LoL. Think about it. They offer a subscription to content that is only accessible if you also rent boxes that decode the content you are already paying for. The idea of free TV has become so foreign that my new 4K TV doesn't even have a tuner.

Some other tidbits to show how everyone is in on subscription services. iPhones and most cell phones have an FM chip that would allow users to listen to free content like the old days, yet phone makers are so in bed with subscription content providers that don't activate the chip.( FCC asks for Apple's help in hurricane-devastated areas ).

Sorry I know the whole thing is long winded, but these services are here to stay. I know I am being exploited in some way by all these companies, but I just make informed decisions and move on. I own Apple devices because they make good products, I use Google services because they are inexpensive and better than most, I subscribe to Adobe CC because they provide the best overall product for my photography hobby. And Cable companies? I hate em, but they are monopolies and I love television.

 

[Ad Dieleman]

^^^ Good write-up, Gary @WestOkid . Like you I basically shrug and subscribe to Lightroom and Photoshop. I've been looking at other programs more than once but I feel LR/PS is just the Goldilocks set of programs.

I just saw that I can install the new versions but I'll hold off a bit until I see that others fare well with them.

 

[roundball]

Agree with all that Gary...

And in April 2014 when TWC got ready to bump my monthly from $103 to $117 bucks I said that's it.

I live within 20-25 miles of all the major TV broadcast transmitters for ABC, NBC, CBS, etc, etc, etc. I researched, bought a couple of large good quality HD TV Antennas with little amplifiers, mounted them in the walk up attic, canceled TWC, and have better IQ reception using Over-The-Air antennas vs. bogged down network delivery.

Even adding Amazon Prime and Netflix for the chief-of-staff to have endless movies, I've still saved $100 / month for 42 months now...and we haven't missed a thing.
Been shedding every possible external dependency I could for a few years...

 

[WNG]

^^^I wish I were that disciplined to maintain a system like that.

The bare minimal backup plan is to have the 3-2-1 strategy. Triple redundancy, two copies on-site, one copy off-site.

If you are running a Windows based PC, you can use a host of software, most of the time free, to automate nearly 90% of it.
The ones I've been using satisfactorily are Syncback and Macrium Reflect. Both have freeware versions. Both have automated scheduling and network support. One takes care of the file backups and mirroring, while the other does full or differential disk imaging. As long as you have an external USB drive (or NAS: network accessed storage), you can maintain a second copy on-site easily. As for off-site, there are a number of options.

1. paid service for cloud storage: One Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. At the moment, I use One Drive because it was bundled with a USB drive I bought. I have 200 GB free for 2 years. It has become good insurance for trip photos as I upload my daily RAWs during the night.

2. flickr. They offer 1 TB of free storage of your photos (for now). I archive my keepers in JPGs to flickr. If you pay for flickr, they provide extra tools and an auto uploadr. But their original beta Uploadr still works with the free service!

3. Redundant disks in safety deposit box. This is Bill's strategy, as stated in the above post. Others also keep a locked and encrypted copy at their office if it's secure enough.

4. VPN to secured off-site HDD: If you have a secure enough work environment to allow you to maintain a hard drive there, and you have unlimited bandwidth internet service,
you can automate daily backups uploaded to this HDD over a VPN.

5. You can also create #4 if you have a trusted friend. Each of you can maintain a dedicated HDD at your houses to offer VPN access to your drives. You each have a secured copy off-site. Off-site is paramount for preventing loss due to fire and theft of your home.

6. If you have a detached garage, work shed, barn, or guest house on your property, you can set up a NAS box in it with a WiFi access point and keep an off-site copy to prevent loss in case of fire and theft of the main dwelling.

It' not a matter of if, but a matter of when you lose your data. It happens more often than most people think.
The discipline is more a matter of getting a plan implemented. The proper plan. Automate as much of it and it takes less effort afterwards.