I’m not a big or prolific photographer. Roughly 75% of my pictures/images are taken for stuff I’m listing on eBay. Incidentally, most of my pictures are taken on a standalone camera. My current one is ancient, a Kodak EasyShare Z950. It’s probably close to 20 years old and, I know, Kodak has been out of the camera business for years.
Incidentally, that thing on your phone that takes pictures is not a real camera. If you have to push on the screen of a thing that you can barely keep steady, it’s not a camera. In fact, if you’ve unfortunately had to watch Apple’s commericals, you’ll see that even they show their phone being held by a handle attachment to hold it steady.
What I wanted to talk about was the recent upgrades to Adobe applications and, unfortunately, their terrible ‘customer support’.
At one time, I was a subscriber to Adobe’s monthly plan, and, for the money per month, it’s not a bad value if you happen to use the extent of their applications. As you can tell, I don’t. It was grating that I was paying $10/month to do contrast/brightenes/cropping on a dozen images per month. So I bought Affinity Photo and canceled the subscription. I did still use Adobe Bridge because it was easy. It download images from the camera, erased them from the camera and presented me with view where I could double-click on any image and have Affinity Photo start.
That is, until Adobe updated their ‘Creative Cloud’ and updated to Bridge 2022. I was totally unsuspecting of what was going to happen. Originally, Creative Cloud would allow you to install older versions of any application. That changed with the recent update, that ability was removed. Second, unknowing to me, when Creative Cloud updated, the default was changed to remove older applications when the update was installed. In short, I was handed an Adobe Bridge update that did not work, with no option to go back.
Bridge 2022 would still download images from my camera, but, when it came to the automatic deletion, it would delete one image, then complain ‘Device is not connector or Busy’. About that time I moved to a new computer and, the same problem still happened. Nor did the USB port matter, tried a few. Finally, I tried to find Adobe Support. I first went to the Adobe Community (where you can find answers!) and got no answers. I received one reply by a technically-weak user with strong, misguided opinions who lambasted me for deleting pictures from my camera because an ‘electronic bust’ could come by and destroy all my pictures. I didn’t answer him since people like that would not understand UPSes and things like backups. Subsequently I found that he was an Apple user, so I can understand he’s probably used to failures like video chips desoldering themselves.
By chance, I found ‘Contact Us’ in Creative Cloud and it led to a chat where I could discuss my problem. They were there for me (right). Now I note that they offer the opportunity to ‘get technical assistance’ but nowhere did they mention that the person I would talk to would be technical at all. I would find that out immediately.
To make a long story short, it took 2 1/2 hours to find out that my camera had been dropped from the list of compatible cameras. Mind you, they still supported some 20 Kodak (obsolete) cameras, but mine was not on the list. I chatted with three of these customer support personages and within the first five minutes with each, I realized that they did not know a thing about what they were supporting. The first two did not even ask to view the problem (yes, they did ask to have access to my computer). The last guy did and he was as lost as the other two. He had to have the problem repeated to him a couple of times. After nearly an hour, when he found the camera compatibility list, he kept trying to get rid of me. I asked about getting an older version and he said ‘You can find it after you reboot’. Sure that would let him off the hook. I told him to show me. For the next 20 minutes he tried to find somewhere in Adobe Creative Cloud where older versions could be installed. He didn’t find it. Finally, I said something nasty enough (You mean you are no help and won’t give me any help to install an older version?) that he got help and got me the installer for Bridge 2021.
What’s the point of all this? If you are in the same situation I was, I have the installer for Bridge 2021 and I will send it to you to save you hours online with Adobe’s Technical Incompetence. Email me at didymus7@hotmail.com and I’ll get it to you.
Incidentally, Bridge 2021 is call version 11. Bridge 2022 is version 12.
Raven of Iskandar 