El Capitan & Adobe Photo Importer

Ouch.  I was rather stung by CameraAnn's comment suggesting, indirectly, that I am foolish (after all, I did upgrade).  I am such a sensitive soul these days!  They say that a fool and his/her money is easily parted and so I guess this is a clear case of mea culpa and so, no fool like an old fool.  It's a fair cop!

But please listen to this old fool for a moment:  I have recently retired but for the past 20 years of my life I have been running my own small business.  Here's what I know about customers (for what it is worth CameraAnn, hope you can bear with this).  Never ever take customers for granted.  Always treat them with the respect they deserve (and sometimes don't deserve!!!).  Stick by them and they will stick by you.  When a customer is in trouble you should bend over backwards to help them and NEVER take advantage (esp overcharge) when a customer is in a vulnerable position.  Be entirely honest with your customer.  Keep you customer advised on progress (or lack of it).  Understand when your customer is upset.  Stay tuned into to your customer and listen for signs of trouble.  Be honest and politely frank with customers.  Make it easy for your client to contact you at any time - one telephone call can easily defuse a bad situation.  There is of course more but I'm sure others will have other wise words of advice to add.

Now, with regard to Apple and Adobe, I have to apply my own business guidelines to them and ask (and you can ask yourself), are Adobe and Apple treating me with the same levels of honesty, openness and respect that I would apply to them if they were my customer?  If Adobe and/or Apple were my customers (they are not and never will be) then do all the above 'rules' return a positive result.  The answer has to be no.  I would certainly (and do) treat Adobe and Apple with respect but is that favour returned?.   Sadly, I can't help feeling that I am being kept at arms length and in the dark (sorry, more mixed metaphors) by Adobe and Apple.  Do they really care about me?  Perhaps not - unless, of course, I am on the sales line buying something.

I am disappointed and maybe that is because I am now old and grumpy and maybe, also, it is because I was brought up in a different era when politeness, good manners and good customer service were the norm.  Perhaps the young whippersnappers these days accept the treatment that is dished up by the larger companies.  This old fool could, of course, be clearly 'off message' and I should perhaps fully retire, leave town and get out of peoples' hair.  And so, CameraAnn, you are perfectly right.  I am a fool.  I am a very, very foolish old fool.  I have paid and continue to pay for a product that doesn't work and continues to give problems.  And so I have to admit, freely, that I am an angry, grumpy, sad, disappointed old fool.  But I also recognise that if you make a customer feel foolish and angry, then you are well on your way to losing that customer.  And, almost finally and incidentally, only fools deliberately let their customers leave and leave angry.

On the upside, I have been playing with Affinity Photo today and I am quite impressed with it.  Were it not for the problems with Adobe/Apple this old fool might not have begun the search for alternative software options.  Now who is the fool?

Best Wishes

Richard (I really should work on a nickname............Old Grumpy perhaps?)

Well, still no real news about when the upload problem is going to be resolved.  I've begun the process of looking for alternatives to Adobe software.  I noticed today that Affinity Photo is on offer - Affinity Photo - Professional image editing software for Mac - at the moment it costs around £30 (around US$43) - a one off cost.  Only for Macs I believe. Sorry Windows users.  Using Affinity Photo is much like using Photoshop and my initial impression is that Affinity Photo is a cost effective and worthy replacement for Photoshop.

Now, it would seem that the Affinity software also has the image acquisition problem we are suffering with Bridge.  On my Mac Affinity Photo can't see my Canon 5D Mk3. I have yet to try Affinity Pro with a card reader but I will try soonest.  That said, Affinity Photo, so far, does everything I need to do with images (apart from upload them ha ha ha).  Currently I'm paying Adobe quite a lot of money every month (more than £30 monthly I believe) for their software which continues to be problematic and, worse, Adobe really don't seem to care about the problems we are all facing.  As I see it, they have a head in the sand philosophy and, at all costs, avoid eye contact with the customers!  Doubtless somebody will point out that it is an Apple problem too and I guess that might be true.  It is also true, however, that I have given both Apple and Adobe a great deal of my money over the years and I can't help feeling disappointed and cheated in equal measure.  I did believe I was paying for quality products.

I'm not a big user of Adobe Illustrator but Affinity has a similar program to Illustrator called Affinity Designer (currently around £40 (US458)) - again, a one off payment not a monthly fee.  And I'm sure Affinity Designer will come on offer soon.  I'll try it as soon as it does.  The other Adobe program I use a great deal is InDesign and so if anyone can recommend a program like InDesign then I would consider moving away from Adobe altogether.  Something that would truly accelerate my departure from Adobe would be an InDesign replacement made by the Affinity people (Serif).

I'm not a great Adobe watcher but I sense that the Adobe ethos has changed in recent years.  I'm not sure if they're moving away from desktop applications in favour of mobile stuff but they certainly seem to be moving away from me!  I have been a loyal Adobe customer for many years now and, to be honest, I used to believe that they just couldn't be beaten but now, taking everything into account, I am not sure that remains true.  It would appear Adobe are squandering their market lead.  I have to admit I was not keen on the move to monthly payments and although there was much hype about regular updates for Creative Cloud subscribers, what I do notice is that updates often amount to a rearrangement of the existing furniture.  Some would say smoke and mirrors.  Others would say Adobe has taken their eye off the ball and the opportunity to streamline and improve their various core products across the board has been squandered.  Alarm bells, perhaps, should have been ringing at Adobe when John Nack left Adobe and went to Google.

Anyhow, I'll now go back to Affinity Photo and see how well it holds up against Photoshop.  if anyone could point me towards and InDesign replacement I would be truly grateful.

Richard

In case it helps anyone, I was able to get around this problem by taking the SD card out of the camera and putting it into a USB card reader. Photo Downloader could then find the card and import the photos normally, even identifying the camera it came from.

The reader I used was the Transcend USB 3.0 Card Reader, TS-RDF5K (though I used it in a USB 2.0 port). The cards I tested were SanDisk Extreme, two different generations and sizes.

Aaron

Problem solved. Bye Bye Apple and El Capitan, welcome Windows 10!!! And everything is working with Bridge and Photoshop!

Three months and the Adobe engineers still have not got to a solution of this issue!

Everyone, I have found a work around. It is called Capture One. I've used it for years in tandem with Adobe products. I have always worked back and forth between ACR and Capture One as there are situations where each of the two applications work better. That said, the Capture One interface is miles better than Lightroom and the results are often better than ACR in many respects – and due to the situation with Bridge I figured out that I can easily accomplish the same folder and image naming conventions in Capture One that I could using Bridge. The import is a bit slower but it's way less tedious than using Apple's Image Capture. If Adobe ever gets it's act together on this problem that will be great, but for now I'm done with hoping for any diligence on their part.

I'm having the same problem with the Adobe Photo Importer. It will not recognize my SD card. I'm running an iMac 5K with El Capitan. I know that the blame-game is in play between Adobe and Apple, but Apple's Photo app autolaunch feature works and recognizes my SD card. I'm just saying. Paying $50 a month, is it really outrage to expect better quality. Greatly improve testing before releasing products to your customers. It hard to believe that this issue was not uncovered before release. I hope this issue can be resolved soon.

I am having the same problem in bridge

Am having the same problem as all the people on all these pages... HOWEVER, I have found that even though Bridge no longer recognizes my Canon 5D III, i CAN download my RAW images to Bridge if I use a card reader rather than my camera. Bridge will recognize my card reader. I hope this will help some of you who sound so desperate and frustrated.

Ok thanks to everyone for posting the Image Capture solution, Yes it works but that is not the point right now as there is total silence from Adobe regarding this issue and I find that rather disturbing.