Ever since I signed in to my Adobe account on the free version of one of their products on my phone (or was it my iPad), they have been sending me email after email telling me that I should spend $10 a month to get Lightroom CC for my computer.

These emails mostly make me feel anxious.

  1. My laptop is the cheapest laptop that Apple sold four years ago. The hard drive is approximately full (even though you are not supposed to keep SSDs full), and I have none of my photos on this computer. No way is Adobe Lightroom CC making its way onto this computer. Don’t care how much things are “in the cloud.” No room for anything on the ground.

  2. My desktop has, I dunno, a terabyte of free space on its hard drive. Its spinning disk hard drive. Its nearly eight year old spinning disk hard drive. My desktop computer has outlived many outdoor cats. (Don’t worry, I do have four back-up drives because I am that type of neurotic.) But I’m not about to change my entire workflow for dealing with photos to rely on a computer from 2010.

  3. If Adobe had told me that I could get Lightroom non-cloud for some moderate number of hundreds of dollars and then run it forever on my eight-year-old desktop machine, I would probably be more interested in the idea. But this whole $10 a month thing gives me the same type of anxiety that I get about the gym. My style of photography is that I go to a place, just to take photos, and then I spend hours and hours in that place just to get a few good shots. It’s not like I have kids that do cute things around the house all the time. (Cats refuse to look at the camera.) There are times that I don’t touch any of my cameras for weeks and weeks and weeks at a time. To pay $10 a month when I am not taking any pictures? Not only would that be $10 that I’m not spending on the ridiculous phone game that I’ve been playing, but I would feel even worse about not taking more pictures.