Lightroom 5 "Develop module is disabled" - really?!

[matt88mph]

My Creative Cloud membership expired a couple of weeks ago. I own the licence to Lightroom 5 and have used it throughout CC membership.

Open LR5 today for first time since CC expired and faced with a disabled develop mode! Speak to support and they tell me LR5 is no longer supported on Mac, only Windows! Best they can offer is a 30 day trial to Lightroom 6?!

I'm still using El Capitan 10.11.6 on Macbook - nothing changed at this end and I've been using LR5 consistently since I purchased my licence about 6 years ago. Product is registered to my Adobe account. Happens to have stopped working right when my CC subscription ended so I'm sure it's linked. And anyway, when has anyone got the right to make a purchased piece of software on my computer obsolete?

Help please! Can't believe what I'm hearing from Adobe support even by their standards - seems to be no recognition there's a problem here.

{Moved from Lightroom Cloud to Lightroom Classic Forum by Moderator} 

[matt88mph]

Just finished a lengthy session with Adobe tech and basically, yes - my copy of Lightroom 5 has somehow been hobbled and there's nothing they can do for me! So that's 80 thousand odd photos, edited, tagged and sorted over 6+ years - develop module now doesn't work. So have option of moving system to Windows which will apparently still work (but for how long) or finding a new piece of software for cataloguing/basic editing my photos and completing my move away from Adobe. Lots of time and expense either way. I'd be interested to know if they're allowed to have done this or whether they're on shaky ground legally? Absolutely shambolic treatment by them so far. 

[Just Shoot Me]

Open LR 5 and go to the Help menu. Then the Lightroom Registration item and this screen comes up.

Go to the License link, or click the Next button, and you get this screen.

Make sure the serial number is entered correctly (Reenter it) and if it is an Upgrade serial number you will need to enter a serial number from any Previous version of LR. You do not need to do any registration so you can click the Finished button.

If you still have any Creative Cloud apps installed Uninstall them and uninstall the CC desktopo app. You may need to do that before you do the license check and serial number re-enter.

Also take a look here.

Stop Adobe Creative Cloud from opening in trial mode after purchase

Stop Creative Cloud from reverting to trial mode

As a last resort you can try unistalling LR 5 and then a reinstall. But REMOVE ALL CC apps before you do that.

This has happened because at the start of the Photography subscription system LR 5 was included with that subscription. So even if you had bought LR 5 as a stand alone perpetual license copy once you installed the CC desktop app and had a subscription LR would look like it was part of that.

This is how it looks on my system.

But I had bought and installed LR 5 as a perpetual licensed version long before I signed up for any subscription plan.

Also note that your current updated LR Classic catalog file will NOT open in LR 5. So whatever work you had done in the newer version of LR will be lost if you did not write metadata to the files. And even then any newer feature edits will not show up.

[matt88mph]

Thanks. They tried to do this but were unable to get any serial code to work - was on remote access with them for hours trying to resolve it!

To their credit they got back to me and have supplied a copy of LR 6 which appears at first glance to be working correctly.

[Just Shoot Me]

Well that was nice of them.

Best of luck.