Adobe Enshittification and Moving on from Photoshop to Affinity Photo 2
For many years, I have paid Adobe for their Creative Cloud Photography Plan - you can’t buy Photoshop; they have a subscription model. It costs about £80/year, depending on special deals I get1. Currently, I have annual licences stacked that run through to April 2027, but I’ve always been aware that I was on the edge of what I would pay each year.
My plan, if Adobe got too greedy with full Photoshop, was to go for Adobe Elements as a one-off purchase and reinforce it with Elements+. That would work out cheaper and probably be enough for my simple needs. But I was unpleasantly surprised when Adobe recently announced that future versions of Elements would be limited to only working for 3 years. Effectively it’s moving Elements to a subscription model, as well.
The reality is that with either Photoshop or Elements, a version 5 years old would still handle all my simple needs around cropping and the odd colour adjustment. While the price of Photoshop seemed reasonable per year, I went along with paying, but actually, I just don’t feel I need lots of new facilities that come out each year. I know Photoshop, and I’ve gone with the easy option, I suppose.
What’s really stuck in my throat is that Photoshop has recently started spamming me when I start the app (on Windows 11) - a recent example is shown in the image below.
Adobe spam when I started Photoshop (under Windows 11)
I couldn’t find a way to stop such splash screen spamming. I note in the spam popup itself is a little tick box to stop it from being shown again for 7 days, but that made me even more incensed and I didn’t go along with it. I noticed later the tick box got changed to 30 days, but that’s still deeply annoying behaviour in what is a professional product I pay a non-trivial amount to use. If it was a free app or one I used at a peppercorn cost, I might understand, but this really does seem to be Adobe trying to grab all it can from a captive audience.
The term Enshittification has come to prominence over the last couple of years to describe companies that use their power in ways that make things worse for consumers as they try to maximise their own take as much as possible. Time-limiting Elements, full-size app pop-up marketing, and what seems a gaggle of startup services (on Windows) all feel unnecessary, and I just don’t want all this gratuitous friction, especially when I pay so much.
If you Google for Photoshop alternatives, then Affinity Photo 2 is always mentioned. and I bought a copy on special offer at £33.99. Note that - I bought it - I can use it as long as I want to. It doesn’t install any startup apps, and when I start Photo 2, it doesn’t try and sell me stuff. I can also install and use Photo 2 on as many machines (of the same type) as I want, whereas with Adobe Photoshop, I’m limited to two, and that becomes frustrating when I get a new computer but still have both old ones active, at least for a while.
Affinity Photo 2 is obviously different from Photoshop, and I’m still finding my way around its dissimilar nomenclature and ways of working, but it seems capable of doing what I need. I’m using the holidays to experiment, and barring some big problem, I aim to move permanently to Photo 2 from the start of 2025. I’m sure there will be some occasional frustrations, but I will hack through them, and they won’t be the frustrations of perpetually paying a lot of money and feeling taken advantage of.
Currently, the full cost of the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan is £119/year. But periodically, Amazon and others have a sale and you can get individual annual licences for typically £70-£80, though once they were below £50 and I bought 3 at that price. You can stack licences for up to 5 years.↩︎