Hi all. If you’ve heard of Adobe’s Terms of Service updates and had any questions, I did a few things this week to hopefully help out. To be honest, while I hate drama and conspiracy theorists, I’m almost glad this happened because it forced me to become a bit more educated on not only Adobe’s Terms of Service (TOS), but also a lot of others that I use in the industry that are in some ways worse.
If you haven’t heard of this change, I’m jealous in a way. I hate drama. I’d say skip this and don’t bother. But I actually do think it’s educational and you can learn something more about it, without participating in the drama. But when I see comments like this, I feel it’s necessary to write something because I know the sentiment is out there.
The problem is that people read this and then actually believe this junk. That Adobe is using their photos for a nefarious purpose, not to mention the cloud stuff. It’s just false so I thought I’d write a little Q&A on the topic to help clear up some questions you may have, or didn’t even know you had. Enjoy!
Q. Does Adobe own my photos?
A. No. You own your photos. Any license Adobe requires in it’s TOS is there to operate it’s services and does not take the place (or come in front of) your ownership rights of your photos. Also, this only applies to photos you have uploaded to the cloud, not photos that have not been uploaded that sit on your local hard drives.
Q. Why does Adobe require ANY license to our photos?
A. There are various legal reasons for requiring some type of license for Adobe to store your photos on it’s servers. There are also many sharing options built in to Adobe apps and certain permission is needed for them to allow you to use these features.
Here’s an example of a Backup service many of you use (Backblaze) and in my opinion, is very similar to what Adobe is doing, just written in a MUCH better way:
You can back up, host, store, and share your own files on Backblaze. The materials you upload to Backblaze are yours and yours alone. You give us permission to use that material solely to do what’s necessary to provide our services, including storing, displaying, reproducing, and distributing those materials. We don’t sell the files you store with us to third parties, and we don’t use them for advertising purposes. We can disclose your files only in the limited circumstances described in our Privacy Notice.
Adobe’s terms are similar – just written in a much more confusing way. But when it comes down to it, a certain amount of permission is needed from you for these companies to operate the services they provide.
Q. Does Adobe use my photos to train it’s AI?
A. Yes and no. Adobe does have an option in your privacy settings that allows them to analyze your “content that is processed or stored on Adobe servers”. However, they don’t “analyze content processed or stored locally on your device”.
That said, there appears to be two categories of content analyzation. The first category is “machine learning” to help improve things like the AI based auto selections, sky replacement, object selection, background replacement, etc… But there is also the “generative AI” features that creates content for us. While your content may be used (if you allow it) for the machine learning part, Adobe states this about the other stuff:
We don’t train generative AI on customer content. We are adding this statement to our Terms of Use to reassure people that is a legal obligation on Adobe. Adobe Firefly is only trained on a dataset of licensed content with permission, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired.
Q. Does Adobe have access to my computer’s local files?
A. No.
Q. Can I change any of my data and privacy settings?
A. Yep. Log in to your Adobe account and go to “Data and Privacy Settings” and you’ll see what you can turn on and off as well as learn more about what it means. (see below)
Q. Should I turn that off?
A. It’s up to you. For me, I think of it this way. Adobe isn’t taking my photos and using them or selling them for their profit. They are using them to make the apps (that I love) better, so that I can make my photos better.
Some may think, if Adobe’s apps are getting better from my photos and they make more money if their apps get better, then shouldn’t they pay me? That’s highly impractical to think they could pay millions of people, without charging more for their apps. And if the law started to require that, then technology would probably go backwards for all software companies, or we’d pay a heck of a lot more as their costs increased.
If I’m being honest, my photos aren’t really worth anything. I have a bunch of landscape photos that millions of people have taken in the same locations. I have a bunch of wildlife photos that, while beautiful to me, are not necessarily special. People are not buying these types of photos because there are millions of them out there. So I stand to gain nothing from my photos, other than my personal enjoyment. It’s a hobby for me and I’m able to use them in my teaching as well. And even if I did sell my work, nothing Adobe is doing devalues my photos or allows them to distribute or show them.
So I’m okay with this. For me, if I can help the company that has provided me wonderful software for the past 30 years, I’m all for it. For the last 10 years they have charged me what I consider a more than reasonable price for my software ($10 a month). We all hear about this 6-7% inflation number and I’m not quite sure what world that number was created on. But I think most will agree, nearly every cost in my life has nearly had a 1.4 – 2x increase in the last 4 years, but my Adobe software has remained the same for 10 years. So for me, I agree to it. But your feelings may differ. That’s okay, and it’s a personal decision, but you asked and that’s my answer 🙂
Let’s Be Practical
I understand people’s mistrust of big corporations. To some extent I have the same. But if we’re being practical here with a bit of common sense, imagine Adobe had one of your photos that uploaded to the cloud. They decided they really like it, and would like to use it in an advertising campaign. Or worse yet… sell it without your permission (because you gave permission in the TOS) and profit from it.
It just doesn’t make sense and it would be a HORRIBLE look for the very company that is helping us create and edit our images. Listen to the uproar that was created every time they consider a price change or even a terms of service change. So imagine the chaos and mass exodus that this would create. It just doesn’t make sense and you can’t point me to an instance in which this has happened, because that’s not what their TOS was meant for. But for some reason, everyone THINKS this is exactly what is happening with their photos.
Moving Forward
All of these big corporations TOS’s have evolved in to legal-speak messes, that nobody reads. My hope is that this recent event causes not only Adobe, but everyone to be more transparent and plain-English in their Terms.
If you knew your phone was listening to you would you have accepted it? I probably wouldn’t. But nearly every person reading this did because in that very exciting moment when we unpackaged our new phone, we had no choice. Almost all of you reading this had their last conversation near their phone listened to. If you have an Amazon Alexa, and you know it was listening to every word spoken in your household, would you agree? Probably not, but we all did because again… in our excitement to unpack whatever device it was and start using it, we had no choice.
As we move forward, I hope that this helps companies become more transparent to what’s being done with our information, right down to the words we speak while in private. In fact, I actually thought Adobe’s terms were worse than they are, and that they used our photos for more than they do. In an odd way, I’m glad this happened because it forced a bit of transparency on their part, and some new education on mine.
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
I started reading Adobe’s ToS and damn near died of boredom. How much do lawyers get paid to write this stuff – must be paid by the word. Thanks for explaining Matt – as clear, direct and helpful as ever.
I totally agree with you. I do not believe Adobe will be using my (so so) images for commercial purpose. I am glad to contribute modestly to the improvements Adobe brings regularly to their software. I think the drama around Adobe TOS is ridiculous and serve only the purpose of creating a fake buzz.
Thanks a ton, Matt! As always, very informative and easy to understand.
Thank goodness. Finally some calm well-reasoned thoughts and information. Thank you. LRClassic is one of the most important tools in my work and for it to cost less than streaming a mediocre movie channel and still be the same price as years ago is amazing. There are plenty of alternatives if someone is unhappy but more than likely they’ll find the TOS of their new editor about the same.
Thank-you for the level-headed explication regarding Adobe’s TOS. You have spared me a lot of internal anguish.
I am one of the few who reads through every single, stinking TOS, from every single service. And I will, and do, call them – on one ISP, a couple years back, the agent laughed and said, ‘You ACTUALLY read the whole agreement?”
To their credit, regardless of the exhaustive legalese, and the onerous task on the subscribers to actually read through it all, Adobe has intelligently addressed the ‘elephant-in-the-room’.
No one can ignore that we are on the precipice of massive change with respect to the use of all technologies and I (for one) appreciate that Adobe is elevated enough to deal with those implications or realities, today.
There are many other corporations and governments that are so far behind this, that they are willing to wait until a crisis develops. In the meantime, as long as I do my part, I trust that Adobe still provides more assurances than most other companies.
One last point: After reading through the other excellent comments here and comparing to a few other sites (posts & strings) I suspect that most of the upset responders probably never read the previous iterations of Adobe’s TOS.
Thanks, Matt. Well written and clear explanation.
I’d like to point out a grammatical error that occurs several times near the start of this post. Twice in the first line under “Does Adobe own my photos?” I see “it’s” used as a possessive pronoun. This is really a contraction of “it is” and here it should have said “its” (no apostrophe), which is the proper possessive form of “it”. I thought I should point this out , it happens a few other times also. In other spots the contraction is used properly.
Its by design (see what I did there). I like to keep the grammar checkers on their toes, and make sure they have something to do 😉
Ha Ha Ha
As usual sound practical advice.Thank you Matt.
Thank you for your sane perspective.
I too am all for Adobe to use my images to train Firefly and other applications. I benefit from these immensely. Most people don’t understand that these features can’t come to reality without large-scale training of the systems. In my professional life, I had the opportunity to dabble in training AI systems over 30 years ago. Of course our efforts were pitiful given the relatively limited compute resources we had access to. This is no longer the case for some very large corporations today. I love the outcomes so far; the Remove Tool, Generative Expand; 1024×1024 rectangles at a time, and others yet to come into production soon like Generative Image.
Matt,
As always, I find your responses to be thoughtful, level-headed, non-reactionary, and practical. That doesn’t mean I agree with every point, but at least you aren’t screaming the sky is falling at the top of your lungs. I follow you because I like your approach to photography and life. Both appear to be tempered with humility, reality, practicality, and sanity.
Thanks for the clarity and common sense advice.
Thanks for the clarity and common sense.
Thank you for adding some level-headed thought to the conversation.
I first read the conspiracy theories, then I read the actual T’s&C’s. I’ve written and worked with a lot of contracts in my 70+ years, and there is absolutely nothing to lose yer mind over here.
Agreed that Adobe makes enough money to hire better lawyers to word-smith things like their TOS (Adobe: love to help you, for a nominal fee of course – get in touch).
But haters just be haters and look for any excuse to jump ship. The TOS change is effectively a big nothing burger.
I have been using Lightroom ever since it was born and as it grew up, I used the overwhelming Photoshop less and less. Today, Lr like a great wine or whisky has matured wonderfully. With the intrduction of the subscription system, a quick simple arithmetic excercise, the $10/month Photographer’s Creative Cloud subscription became a no brainer by including all updates and upgrades of all the apps I use, for less than the annual upgrade for just one of the apps. I hardly use the Adobe cloud and all my work is stored on my hardwares.
Through ought my history with Adobe, every little change of software or TOS, has been attacked vociferously by the conspiracy theorists. If one has a problem with Adobe, why don’t they simply move on and use an alternative software, of which there are an abundance of excellent modern apps.
Ironically the conspitators will still have problems with all the alternatives, who today also offer various forms of subscription plans.
There is a reason why Adobe software is used by the vast majority of Graphic/computer Artists and Photographers worldwide.
Thanks Matt,
Regards, sey
A voice in the desert has shed some light. Thanks Matt
Thanks, Matt. I did not believe the misrepresentations about Adobe.
But I think many people only educate themselves on fb or where a lot of misinformation is rampant.
Thanks for helping to bring clarity and truth to the discussion.
Regards
Elaine Flournog
A lot of knee jerk reactions to Adobe’s updated TOS by a few prominent YouTubers has caused undue stress and unwarranted alarms within the photography community. As a longtime user of Adobe’s software I agree with what Matt has stated here.
Excellent and succinct Matt. I always read (speed read) TOS just to ensure I didn’t by pass anything of significance. With Adobe, Backblaze or any other large company from whom I elect to use their service, I obviously trust them. If I didn’t, I have to be a fool to pay them and get the service.
Bravo to you for. explaining it in clear terms.
It is a shame that Adobe can’t seem to do anything in a non-confusing manner. For years their photography software product line-up has been the most convoluted mess ever. Now this TOS confusing rollout. Come on Adobe, do better.
Thanks for clarifying this issue with a very understandable discussion.
Conspiracy theorists at it again to create division and chaos. Clearly the difference is Matt read and reasoned through the language. I appreciate you.
Thanks Matt. This is by far the clearest and most reasoned response I’ve seen so far on the TOS brouhaha. Thank you for cutting through the legalese and the pitchfork and torches reactions and boiling it down to practical terms for us.
I appreciate all you do for the creative community!
Great post, Matt. There’s been a ridiculous amount of hype around this, but you’ve clarified the facts in a really balanced and understandable way.
Thank you SO MUCH for this, Matt. The nonsense that some people are posting online about the updated Terms of Service is absolutely outrageous.