The final straw for me was repeatedly having the Creative Cloud app come up as an empty box. I’d been thinking of canceling my subscription when Adobe came up for renewal in August, and this put me over the edge.
From my Daily Note of July 2, 2025:
Adobe’s Creative Cloud app is coming up blank white again even after logging in to Adobe via the web. That’s another thing to dislike about Adobe … installation is kind of a mess. Their marketing makes me want their software but the actual experience of using it is rather disappointing. I would like to run Lightroom Classic but have found it to be fiddly, unreliable, and too restrictive for me. Reliance on fragile catalog. Brittle file system requires import and no outside actions. Emphasis on artificial intelligence over actual photographers. Adobe “learning as they go” has resulted in rather frequent large workflow and file storage changes.
Make that 3 months. My licence with ON1 lasted 3 months and now they want me to pay again to move from PhotoRaw 2025 to PhotoRaw 2026. Suffice to say I would NOT recommend using ON1 at all.
This is why software developers can’t win with us users (and I do mean “us”!).
We don’t want subscriptions. We think full licenses cost too much so they put their apps on sale for something like 50% off. When they release a new version that we don’t get for free, we’re mad and call them greedy.
Seems like @svsmailus has a bit of a reading comprehension problem … these statements basically say the same thing. That one forum member’s opinion is not every member’s opinion.
Anyways, this statement is no doubt untrue:
Unless, for example, you don’t buy groceries.
I have On1 2024. It still works today! It has all the functionality I paid for when I bought it. And that is my expectation, and why I do not like subscriptions. I pay for what a product can do when I buy it, not some promise of potential future functionality.
I find the On1 model to be a reasonable one. I get to keep what I paid for, and I get to decide if any new features are worth paying for.
Of course, this is just my opinion and does not represent the whole forum.
I have free institutional access to CC but have completely gone over to Nitro, Have paid for Topaz DXO and Luminar and given up on their subscription pricing (especially the not a subscription but upgrade every year model).
These days, I think there’s a duty of care to look at the history of software releases. If anyone is thinking of buying PhotoLab, I will explain the yearly release cycle and n-2 upgrade policy. There are bad times of year to buy new.
Would you buy a new flagship iPhone in August? I’d guess not because you know Apple’s release schedule. I bet a lot of people do, though.
The trick is to manage expectations against history and likely future.
Every thing. How many software products explicitly state they will continue updates for 1 year after you purchase? I know some do (Topaz, Luminar) but I’d say most don’t. There have been many stories over the years of people buying only to find something happens soon after and they feel out of pocket.
On balance, I think ON1’s practice of selling “version X” and then just stopping that and launching a new “version Y” is one of the worst models, but I don’t think it can be claimed this was unknowable.
I’ve had a love-hate relationship with on1 for at least a decade.
Their software is packed with features and is good value for what you get and has a much lower cost of entry than most of those in this field. It allows you to do pretty much anything you might need or want to do with your photos. You have the choice of buying or subscribing. They publish quite a lot of tutorial-type material aimed at practical tasks (like creating an autumn portrait) and they issue free add-ons (like effects presets)
On the other hand, their raw engine (that actually processes the images) is old and creaking and can give you less than optimal results, depending on which camera and sensor you use (it’s pretty poor for x-trans 5). Their latest and greatest features (e.g. AI resizing, masking or noise reduction) tend to be a bit hit and miss but can seem miraculous when they work. There are bugs that have been in the software for many years, but the development effort goes into new and shiny much more than into the fundamentals.
I wouldn’t say they are greedy. Their business model is lots of sales and lots and lots of upselling (e.g. to their “plus” membership) - they are seeking a bit of income from many users, but you don’t have any guarantees except that what you buy or rent right now will do a pretty good job for a year or so, but they’ll try to offer you another sale to hook you into their next annual version. To be fair, there are always new and shiny features in each new version that might or might not be worth the upgrade.
The alternative is to pay a fortune for something more professional (e.g. Capture One) or make peace with paying a fairly hefty, recurring and ever-increasing subscription to someone like Adobe or to find another software (like Luminar) which operates a similar “sales and upgrade” business model, with a similar imbalance betwee new and shiny and fundamentals.
Can we agree that debating subscription versus time-frame licensing of software is right up there as a forever issue that will never be solved to everyone’s satisfaction?
I’d say almost close to the “Apple versus Windows” or “iPhone versus Android” debates.
I think, in these forums, we should voluntarily reframe from engaging on the topic of how we pay for any particular software and focus more on the features/merits/technology and simply let the buyer make their decisions on purchase/licensing methods on their own?
OTOH I find Lightroom Classic as close to perfect as I can get given current options.
Your 2 main issues
Are features not bugs. I am in total control of the catalog. So it’s all on me to make sure it’s accurate. No outside actions means no one else can FU my system. I have to do that myself.
Over in another forum related to DxO products, I am following a thread were people are complaining that PhotoLab is slow loading large folders of images. Which is because it doesn’t rely on a catalogue.
