How exactly is this better than Spark?

[Bob on a Mac]

 I'm rather disappointed by the changes made to Spark since the new Creative Cloud Express is even less functional for me the way I use it. Removing the free stock image option and replacing it with only Adobe Stock images really reduces how useful it is to me. Sometimes Stock doesn't have what I need but I could find it in either one of the 2 free stock image options. There also doesn't seem to be an easy way to sort through the Stock images I currently own, which is a huge headache. I don't want to search through over 14,000 images related to what I searched for if I already own a Stock image.

As it is right now, the way photos works is completely useless for me and is a major time suck. In order to restore functionality that Spark had, I will have to have a tab open with Stock images so I can easily see what I have, download what I need and then re-upload it. If Stock doesn't have what I need, I would then need to search the internet. Finding the right image(s) for marketing was already time consuming, but this change just makes Creative Cloud Express way too time consuming to use. Right now I don't see any of the changes made as positives at all, since this issue I encountered is a really major problem & likely means that continuing with an Adobe subscription is not going to be a worthwhile use of time & money. "Disappointed & frustrated" is a huge understatement for how I feel right now. 

[Kevin-Monahan · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your notes and your feature requests, Bob. Glad to have such feedback we can share with the team. Sorry you are not finding what you want in the Creative Cloud Express product.

My advice to you in having us take action is to take your feature requests to the User Voice site, where feedback for Creative Cloud Express is collected by the product team and can be upvoted by the community. As these are largely user to user forums staffed only by support folks, like myself, Saquib, Manmeet, and others, please repost your requests on that site, if you do not mind.

If you do, place links to your requests here, so that the community can upvote your requests. I would be happy to do that, as well as, advocate for better photo selection and better free options for the product. 🙂

Thanks,
Kevin

[Kristie-ish]

Bob on a Mac,

I completely agree with you. I spent over an hour trying to 'figure out' the best way to create something that I used to create in Spark in ten minutes. Lots of scrolling, the 'free' Stock photos have watermarks (what is the point in using them?), the ones marked as 'transparent background' are not. I just don't know why they just didn't add new features and keep everything else the same!

[Saul22601443frm9]

I don't have any watermarks on my stock photos. And I use the free version.

[Kristie-ish]

Maybe they have revised it since February 10th. I have a Creative Cloud subscription and the photos I got from Adobe stock had watermarks on them. Thanks - I'll have to check it out to see what improvements they made since I last logged in. I was so frustrated that I stopped using it.

[Saul22601443frm9]

All my photos that I have been using this year, not 1 watermark.

I use the free version. So maybe it's different if you pay for it. 

But if you pay for it, it shouldn't be there either.

[ProDesignTools]

There are over 1 million images now available in the Adobe Stock Free Collection... Is that what you're referring to, @Kristie-ish?

None of those should be watermarked and can be used just like you paid for them. Once you "license" them, you can use them in your projects in Creative Cloud Express and elsewhere, at no cost and with no expiration.

Of course, there are many millions of Adobe Stock images which are not in that gratis collection, and those would still be watermarked if not yet purchased.

[Carin5CC2]

Alla my Sparks projects since several years are lost! I am devastated! Can they be retrieved? I don't know what to do. I have tried to log in again. I'm using my ordinary Google + Chrome web reader. Nothing has changed! What has happened???

[Manmeet2016]

Hi Carin, 

We hope that the above steps shall help you to retrieve your projects. Please try the steps once and also check if you have the same account for logging in to your account? If that doesn't do the trick, please write us back with any observations. We will assist you further.

Thanks

Manmeet