The Big Adobe Lightroom Confusion of 2017

This is MAX week. This usually means exciting news from Adobe about new and improved products, and sometimes frustration with new user interfaces and applications that may not have gotten as much love from Adobe as others.

This year, Adobe created quite a bit of confusion on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom community. When we look back at the Lightroom history, in the beginning, there used to be only one version and life was simple. This was the case up to Lightroom 5. No decisions had to be made, about which flavor of LR to get. In the Lightroom 6 timeframe, Adobe created a second version of Lightroom: Lightroom 6 was the version with the perpetual license (you paid once and then got to use that version until either your operating system no longer supported it, or you had a newer camera that was no longer supported by the version of Lightroom you were using). In addition to that, Adobe also released a subscription based version as Lightroom CC (for “Creative Cloud”). The subscription version had the advantage that the customer received new functionality automatically by just installing the latest and greatest version.

With this year’s MAX, there were a number of changes to this: One of these versions got retired, one changed it’s name, and a new one – sharing the same name as one of the current offerings, but as a completely different product – got introduced.

Here is the gist:

The perpetual license version of Lightroom is gone.

What used to be Lightroom CC is now Lightroom Classic.

Lightroom CC is now a cloud based application, but with local editing.

Because of that confusion, Adobe felt compelled to answer some frequently asked questions: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/10/answering-your-questions-on-lightroom-cc-lightroom-classic-cc-and-more.html

I’ll stay with Lightroom Classic, but this last round of changes leaves me – despite the assurances by Adobe – wondering about the future of Lightroom Classic…