GoKawiilAn infuriating goodbye to Photoshop
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again.
Photoshop used to be a joy to use. Whenever I got access to an upgraded version, I’d always have fun exploring the new features. I got really good at using it. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop in 2013, I signed up immediately. The subscription meant I would always have an up-to-date Photoshop, and I loved the idea that new features would be rolled out more frequently.
But over time things started getting worse. Slowly at first, but then much more quickly.
Originally, the Creative Cloud app was native and relatively useful. I wasn’t ever excited to open it, but I certainly didn’t mind having it installed. At some point, it became a terrible web-based app. Over time it felt slower and more broken.
One thing I loved as part of the Creative Cloud subscription was the Creative Cloud Synced Files service. Basically, it was Adobe’s version of DropBox. I used it all the time to share screenshots and samples of in-progress work. Then, in 2023, Adobe announced they’d be discontinuing the service. There was so much pushback that they delayed the service’s retirement for a year. It makes sense, it was a nice feature of the subscription plan and businesses had come to rely on it. This was the first time I started questioning my Creative Cloud subscription.
Out of curiosity, I looked around at the available options. I played with Pixelmator Pro, Acorn, and Affinity Photo (now Affinity). They were all fine, but I couldn’t let Photoshop go. I just knew it too well. But I also started realizing how little I was using it.
I used to do a lot of traditional web development. In days of yore, this involved getting Photoshop mockups from designers. Those images needed slicing into pieces that you’d use to build a site or an app. But I hadn’t gotten a Photoshop document from a client in years. The PSD had been replaced with Sketch files, then with links to Figma documents. I still used Photoshop to touch up images, but that really didn’t use much of its power. The only thing holding me to the product was familiarity.
Then I started to notice some real quality issues. For some reason that I still don’t understand, my copy of Photoshop stopped updating. I didn’t notice for a while, but eventually I stumbled upon the release notes and saw that I was something like nine months behind. I was able to fix this by forcing the Creative Cloud app to reload its settings using Command + Option + R , at which point I could update. Then, a few months later, Photoshop updates started getting stuck. I’d start an update, but it would spin for hours but never complete. I was able to fix this by uninstalling Photoshop using the Creative Cloud app, then re-installing it… but I had to do this more than once. Soon after that, every new Photoshop update would reset my preferences to the defaults. I’d need to take 5 or so minutes to re-apply my settings every time.
A little while later, Adobe started silently updating my /etc/hosts file for license verification purposes. As posited in that link above, the Creative Cloud app now felt like malware to me. But that wasn’t all, Photoshop itself had started feeling terrible. There was now an annoying welcome screen that would re-appear for me whenever I didn’t have an image open. There was an option to disable it, but the option was reset every time I relaunched Photoshop for a couple of releases. Then Adobe decided to replace almost all of Photoshop’s native UI controls with web-based ones. This was the final straw.
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