I've been an Adobe customer since…jeez…I don't even know. 2004? 2005?
Photoshop has been my go-to editing software, and Bridge (as rocky as that relationship has been over the years) has been my image organizing tool since before I was even a Mac user. But no more. I stumbled across this video the other day and it set my blood boiling:
I was unaware of this bit of assholery on Adobe's part, and like many others, just randomly clicked the "Accept" button after being presented with that splash screen without actually reading the terms and conditions. (I mean, who does?) After discussing this situation with Ben (we shared an Adobe subscription) and weighing our options, we decided to join the revolt and tell Adobe to go fuck itself once and for all.
Unfortunately…we had switched from the Full Creative Cloud Suite to just the Photoshop Plan a little over a month ago (just out of my get-out-of-jail-free period), and they were going to charge me $99 to cancel. I didn't have the funds to drop on that right away, but vowed that I would do it on the next paycheck.
Well, Ben located this today:
Guess what? It works! 🎉
I now use Pixelmator Pro (a one time purchase of $50 through the App Store, not $19.95/month as it was for Adobe Photoshop) for image editing/creation and XnView (free/donation) for image cataloging/organization. Pixelmator Pro has been a bit of a learning curve, but learning is always good, right? It doesn't have all the features of Photoshop (notably AI generation which I was using for creating backgrounds of smaller images on bigger canvases as well as ridding pictures of meddlesome text), but it's damn close. And as I wrote in that post from a few years ago, I've finally gotten XnView configured and customized totally to my liking and it doesn't randomly crash for no reason like every version of Bridge since it was first introduced.