I'm a fine art photographer. Since several years now, I've become increasingly frustrated by, not to say fed up with, all the gimmicks Adobe has added to LrC. The User Interface has become totally cluttered with totally un-photographic garbage, e.g. Artifical Intelligenc (who needs that except those who like fake photos, fake people and a fake world?!), way too complicated actions in order to just use a dodge and burn brush (that's the root of all real photographe, dear AI!) which now forces me to make a "mask", name it, and always open the "masking" menu in order to see that I actually applied dodging or burning!
I've had this very same problem, and nothing helps to correct it: AI masks or settings needing to be updated randomly and without any real cause (hey, I thought the I in AI stood for "Intelligence"?!...).
I've worked in IT in a previous life, a long time ago, and I can tell Adobe programmers one thing: The more stuff you stuff into a program, the more chances there are, the more opportunities you create, to have bugs, to have things work against each other instead of with each other, and especially the more the user interface, the usability, the learning curve gets worse!
If only I could revert back to a Lightroom like it was in the very beginning: A fresh breeze, a simple, consistent, logical, helpful tool for my digital photography workflow, a truly fantastic program to use. I can't anymore. I've been forced for years to upgrade, update, convert catalogs, files, metadata and all the other parameters, caches, and data files that now surround and clutter what once was a truly great piece of programming.
Every couple of months new "issues" (problems!!!) arise with LrC, syncing, and really essential things like renaming Published Folders - a bug that has been around for two years and was never solved.
What I gather from all the testing over the last three weeks with a serious problem affecting syncing to the Adobe Cloud, and now seeing how many (!) other users struggle with the AI settings forcing us to click a menu item to have the "Intelligence" of AI wake up and do whatever it deems necessary to do to fake a true "photograph" into a "digital image" (there's a very clear difference!), is that LrC cannot handle anything related to permissions on its own files whenever the OS (in my case macOS, thank heavens for that) has to or wants to make things more "secure".
I'm fed up, really fed up. Either I now sell all my digital cameras and accessories and go back to using film, or I dump Adobe's software for something else (without any guarantee I don't have to become a slave to AI also in that new "universe") and find myself forced to rework almost twenty years of editing.
What I don't agree with, is that people who are being well paid to make, correct, de-bug, and improve a piece of software, expect the users (who pay them...) to do all the testing, logging, de-bugging, writing on forums like this one and thus actually helping them, etc., all for free and having to waste days or weeks of work and income in order to see their hopes of a new update or new version without any bugs or annoyances or minutes of waiting before a catalog opens up (!), vanish every single time.
I don't know about other users, but I'm not taking this anymore. I don't take Adobe serious anymore. Sorry, I've tried. I've tried since 2006. It's time to create and edit photographs (either digitally or in the dark room) again, without any energy, good mood, or money wasted on doing the testing, the de-bugging, the logical thinking for those who are being well-paid to do that in the first place.
"Less Is More!", meaning less AI, less faking photographs, less clutter in the user interface, less files surrounding the true software, less complicated uploads and downloads, and whatever syncs to whatever other piece of Adobe software in whatever way...
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