Is Adobe trying to retire Lightroom Classic?

As of January 2025, Adobe is no longer offering its regular 20GB Photography Plan subscription to new users at its old $9.99/month price tier. Existing subscribers can continue to use it, though at an increased cost of $14.99/month. But for new users, there is now only the 1TB Lightroom Plan (now $11.99/month) and the 1TB Photography Plan ($19.99/month – as before).

The storage amount in each plan is significant. The old entry-level plan only came with 20GB storage – enough for anyone storing their photos locally on their own computer but not enough for anyone using Lightroom and Adobe’s Creative Cloud storage. This is a requirement for Lightroom – you can back up your images locally but they must all live in the cloud. As of January 2025, there are non photography plans that don’t include this storage which, of course, constitutes a large part of the monthly subscription fee.

Adobe’s decision to drop the 20GB Photography Plan seems to me a clear sign that it wants to hasten users’ migration from the old desktop-first Lightroom Classic to the newer web-first Lightroom (previously called Lightroom CC).

There’s something else – the name. From the start, Adobe’s decision to name the web-first version simply as ‘Lightroom’ while the desktop-first version became ‘Lightroom Classic’, was a clear sign. But as of January 2025, I see that the Adobe website is now using the world ‘legacy’ to describe Lightroom Classic. There have been no official announcement, and I doubt Adobe would publicly commit to shutting down Lightroom Classic – at least not right now – but it seems to me the writing is on the wall.

It’s clear that Adobe sees its business future as web-based, with desktop and mobile apps designed for collaborative, cloud-based storage. And with this online storage now forming a compulsory part of photography plans for new users, it stands to earn a great deal more money than previously.

And while Adobe is continuing to support 20GB Photography Plan subscribers who signed up before the change, it’s with a 50% hike in the monthly subscription, which is bound to make many subscribers upgrade to the newer 1TB plan. You also have to wonder how much longer Adobe will support existing 20GB Photography Plan subscribers before closing that down too.

While Adobe is not overtly shutting anything down right now, it is squeezing new and existing users ever more tightly in the direction it wants them to go. And whatever the merits of having your photo catalog stored in the cloud, I’m sure most of us would prefer to have the choice, rather than being forced to pay for a thing whether we want it or not.