I've been running "photo booths" at vendor fairs and festivals for years, they're very successful and profitable and people really enjoy them. I setup a backdrop and a few strobes, take people's photos, then sell the results. I have on-site photo printers that allow people to walk away with prints in hand, and a code on the back of the print to allow people to buy the digital copy or more prints on my website. My workflow currently depends on Lightroom, with my camera tethered to a laptop with a long USB cable. It's been super reliable for years.   So last week there was a big local festival. I paid to book a spot there for my photo booth. Hauled my hundreds of pounds of gear. Picked a prime spot before anyone else got there, and spent over an hour setting up. My hired assistants showed up, as expected. Then 30 minutes before the festival was set to open, I started up my laptop to get the software ready (which I had confirmed was functional and up to date before leaving home).   Disaster: Lightroom Classic refused to start. Why? No Internet connection. No cell signal. Nothing. This festival was out in the boonies. I brought my generator and enough gas to run it for 8 hours, but that didn't get me any kind of Internet signal. None of my Creative Cloud software would run. They all tried to authenticate online before starting, and they all failed and shut down without giving me any other option.   Basically I was screwed. I was out my sign-up fee, had to pay my assistants for showing up, packed everything up and went home. The organizers were very disappointed, my booth had been one of the advertised services.   After years and years of doing these photo booths without issues, this is the first time I came across this infuriating issue. The whole thing cost me $280 and a whole lot of reputation, not to mention the lost income. I am seriously angry, I'm not sure I want anything to do with this subscription garbage anymore. My software was authenticated on my laptop literally a couple of hours before the event. There's no good reason why it should've locked me out just because it couldn't dial home.   If there's a solution to help prevent this from ever happening again, I'd love to know what it is. Otherwise, I think it's time to give up on this whole subscription nonsense and move onto real software that I can depend on. It'll mean coming up with an entire new workflow from scratch, but at least I won't have such a disaster happen again. ... View more