Please let me out!! A rant…

This is for once a post without pictures because unless using prison-photographs I don’t know how to illustrate this rant.I thought long and hard in the last days. I thought about the Adobe offerings of Lightroom and Photoshop and their monthly cost.

Fact is, I use Photoshop hardly at all. It is there, part of the photography plan from Adobe but gets practically no use.

Lightroom to the contrary hosts all my film photography. But what do I use it for? I import my photographs from my scanner, hunt for the usual dust bunnies, apply some contrast, clarity and a drop of sharpening…. and that’s all.

All that for the price of over 12€ a month. Is that worth it?

OK, Lightroom can catalog my photography quite nicely, but I already do that myself in a strict folder structure and a consistent naming scheme. Then again I never really got the hang of Photoshop – the reason why I hardly use it, and Lightroom, though immensely powerful, is often a bit hard to understand for me. Mind you, I’m over 50, old school and perhaps too stupid. But that’s the feeling I get from those pieces of software.

You might love them and use them extensively as they are the de facto golden standard of image treatment, and this is only my humble opinion, so I won’t be discussing the validity of it.

I decided to export my stuff with all Lightroom adjustments and load it into my humble Apple Photos app that already hosts my older digital stuff as well as my recent iPhone photos. So I’ll have all in one place!

I outfitted Photos with some add-ons like Tonality-, Affinity Photo- and  Pixelmator-extensions and it does what I tell it to do.

Next step was to try to cancel my Adobe membership, and here I ran into a wall! And before you say I should read the fine print, I am aware that its an annual plan I can cancel only at a specific date.

I accessed my account page, according to the information good Google gave me, where I was to find the ‘CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION’ button I was promised and…. nothing! Not a trace of it, despite screenshots showing it.

I searched for a long time without success and decided to contact their support. Of course there was no relevant FAQ information concerning cancellation other than the one I already found. So I decided to contact their support. I enter a fine chat that has me waiting for about 15 minutes before a nice indian gentleman writes back. I state my question and he has to transfer me to their cancellation team (yep, they got one of those!).

Another 15 minutes later (man, why can’t I send a mail and get a reply later. I hate waiting in front of a screen that says ‘do not close this window or navigate away from this’). I explain the next person my problem and that I thoroughly thought it through, only to be told that early cancellations incurs a fine of 50% of the remaining months of my plan. Make that about 3 months worth. That’s OK with me basically.

Then he desperately tries to get me to stay, to change my mind, to again state why I started using their software and why I want to leave… I remain firm and he offers me one month free… and no way to register my cancellation right now for next February!

I’ll have to make sure to contact them again next february (another hour of my time going down the drain there), and not forget to do so. I guess they just count on their customers to miss the deadline and be stuck for one more year. Not me though, I’m an organized person with a calendar!

I have no problem with the fact that my plan can be cancelled annually only, I signed up for that!  My problem is that they make it extremely hard to cancel!

Even Dropbox have a link on the account page to cancel a paid plan. Evernote do too. Of course their annual plans have a fixes cancellations date, but you can file your cancelleaation any time – service will continue until then. Well everybody except Adobe seems to have no problem with customers wanting to cancel!

OK, now I feel better! Sorry to have bothered you with this rant!

And thanks for reading… if you made it this far!

And all considered, here’s a nice photo anyways: