NicHamilton wrote:
As for storing data in the cloud I know of at least one big corporate that stores a lot of their data in the cloud. I was surprised too.
If the company in question is not one of the owners of the cloud, then I would share your surprise.
NicHamilton wrote:
Your final point about losing one's catalog if the internet goes down doesn't make sense to me, if I understand you correctly.
My catalog remains on my PC along with the LR software. LR Mobile uses the internet to sync some of the information stored within it with mobile devices. If I lose the internet I lose communication between the devices but not my catalog.
I'll try to clarify. To use Lightroom Mobile, a Creative Cloud Photography Plan is a minimum pre-requisite costing (about £8 a month where I live). If that is your only license agreement, if you do not own a perpetual license of Lightroom, I can see subscription ending scenario being triggered in the event of an extended internet blackout or a combination of events the designers did not think of. This is an interesting readRe: Top Ten Questions About Creative Cloud.
Take 3 scenarios, all without a perpetual license:
a) you do not own a perpetual license and are on a trip, a field trip, without internet access for more than 7 days and you are using LR on a laptop, the 7 day period grace gets triggered. Let's assume that you are offline for more than 14 days, you might very well loose access to your catalog but not to your files unless you get internet connection (good luck if your visiting certain parts of the world)
b) you stop paying your subscription, you lost access to your catalog
c) for reasons nowunknown to us we loose internet connectivity for a month or the Adobe servers are unreachable, you lost access to your cataog
What is in your catalog? You keywords, collections, saved prints, possibly books, and crucially any adjustments made to your files. So loosing your catalog = loosing all your hard work.
I have been on trips with extended periods without internet connectivity but had my camera, laptop and LR installed on it; photography was the whole point of the trip. Without a perpetual license I would have lost access to my catalog more than once. As for c) not happening, I am old enough to remember the year 2000 problem and the mad rush to fix all of this computer programs that only supported 2 digit years and were not meant to have been in use 40 years after they were wrote.
I fail to understand why we have to design systems that must have access to the internet on a regular basis. It makes the internet a single point failure.
To sum up, you must own a perpetual license not to suffer a subscription ending scenario.