How to Cancel Lightroom Subscription in 2023 (+ Avoid Fees)

Have you found a better solution for your photo editing than Adobe Lightroom? Or perhaps you started working for a company that has a team subscription so you don’t need to keep yours.

Maybe you’re just done with photography (I hope not!). Whatever the case, you’ve decided that you don’t want to continue with your membership. What now?

To cancel Adobe Lightroom is very easy; the tricky part is the implications of doing it. If you want to terminate your Lightroom subscription, there are some issues that you need to consider first.

Is your subscription only for Lightroom or do you have a Photography Plan, meaning you’d also cancel your Photoshop subscription? Do you have your images on cloud storage or on your computer? Do you have an annual or monthly subscription to the Creative Cloud?

It’s not difficult to cancel Adobe CC, but you have to think about these issues to make the best decision on how and when to do it. In this guide, I’ll clear up some of the most common doubts about this process.

How to Cancel an Adobe Subscription

 

To cancel your Adobe Lightroom Classic trial or Creative Cloud plan (purchased from Adobe), follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Under My Plans, you’ll see the option Manage Plan. Click on it.
3. Then, find Plan Information, and there click on Cancel Plan. If this option is not available at the moment, check again the next day as they’re probably handling your payment. If it still doesn’t show up, contact customer support.
4. After you click on Cancel Plan, you’ll be offered a series of reasons to indicate why you want to cancel your Adobe access. Click whichever seems appropriate. You can also click on Other if you want to elaborate or you can’t find one that fits your situation.

How to cancel a subscription on Apple

If you purchased your Adobe access using your Apple ID, follow the steps here for subscription cancellation options.

What Happens If I Cancel My Lightroom Subscription?

Please consider that just cancelling Lightroom when you have a subscription for the entire Creative Cloud or the Photography plan is not possible. If you cancel Lightroom, you’ll lose the other apps too.

If you decide to cancel anyway, or you only had a Lightroom subscription, there are two things to consider: the payments and your photos.

Your Payments

If you recently subscribed to Lightroom and you were not convinced by it, you have a 14-day period to cancel it and get a full refund on your payment.

If you’re over the 14-day trial period, you won’t be entitled to a refund – it doesn’t matter if it’s been 15 days or 10 years.

In fact, it’s possible you’ll even have to pay a penalty. This depends on the type of subscription that you have.

If you’re like me, you accepted the terms and conditions without reading them. I mean, they’re long, complicated, and you can’t really opt out of them if you need to use the product, right?

Well, that was my logic, and looking at all the confusion found online about cancelling Lightroom, I think it was most people’s thinking too.

Turns out that Adobe offers annual plans paid in advance, annual plans paid monthly, and monthly plans. The mix-up usually comes between the last two.

If you’re paying for the Lightroom once a month, you might be paying the monthly rate from an annual fee or you might be paying the monthly subscription. Each of these Creative Cloud plans responds differently when you cancel.

If you have a monthly Creative Cloud subscription, you can cancel it at any time of the month and the service will be effectively suspended at the end of that month. No extra costs are involved.

If you were paying an annual plan, the service will end with the month. However, if that wasn’t the end of your subscription year, you’ll have to pay a penalty that amounts to 50% of the remaining time of your contract obligation.

This is because you accepted to be subscribed to Adobe CC for one year, despite the fact that you didn’t pay it in full at the time.

This is something that happens for all the Creative Cloud products. Usually, the monthly fee from an annual plan is cheaper than the monthly plan.

This is why most people take this without realizing that they would have to continue paying until the end of the year if they cancel.

To find out which plan you have, log into your Creative Cloud account. Then, under My Plans, you’ll find the details of your subscription.

How much does it cost to cancel an Adobe CC subscription?

If you have an annual plan, it will cost you 50% of the remaining time of your subscription year.

For example, if you subscribed in January and cancel it in April you’ll have 8 months remaining until the end of your contractual obligations. As a penalty, you’ll have to pay for half of that, so 4 months.

The payment of the cancellation fee is done in full at the moment you cancel, it’s not possible to do it in instalments.

If you have a monthly plan, you can cancel at any time without paying anything. Do consider that cancelling before the end of the month doesn’t entitle you to a refund for the corresponding part of the fee.

In other words, if you pay $10 for a month of usage and you cancel on the 15th of that month, you won’t get $5 back. On the plus side, you can still use it until the end of the month.

Your Photos

What happens to your photos when you cancel your Adobe CC subscription depends on which Lightroom you use and your own workflow.

Lightroom Classic is targeted at studio-based (or home-based) photographers, so if you use this, your originals are saved on your hard drive. Although, you might have stored things on the cloud purposely.

On the other hand, Lightroom CC is dedicated to photographers on the go that might need access via different devices, so the originals are stored on the cloud.

Let’s start with something that concerns you either way. All plans from Adobe CC include a certain amount of storage in the cloud. When you cancel your subscription you need to consider the images you have stored in it.

Regardless of which Lightroom you were using, you can keep a cloud storage limit of 2GB for free after you cancel. If you had more than that stored on the cloud, Adobe gives you 90 days to download anything that’s over the new storage limit.

Aside from that, Lightroom CC will keep your originals for a year. During this time, you can still launch Lightroom to access and download them.

Lightroom Classic is desktop-based, so you can continue to use it on your computer to manage your images. So, you can import and organize them. Then you can export them for web or printing.

You can’t, however, use it as a photo editor anymore because the Develop and Map modules become inactive. All your original images are on your hard drive though, so you can use any photo editing software that you want.

FAQ’S

Can you pause Adobe’s subscription?

No, Adobe doesn’t have options to pause or temporarily suspend a subscription.

Can I cancel Lightroom anytime?

Yes. You can do it by contacting customer support or via your Adobe account page.

How to deactivate Lightroom 6?

Access the Creative Cloud Manager, click on Adobe account, and View Plan Details to deactivate Lightroom 6.

How to cancel lightroom subscription on iPhone?

Click your Apple ID to access the Subscription list. Tap Lightroom then press the Cancel Subscription button.

How to delete an Adobe Lightroom account?

Open the app’s settings, choose Account, and then select Delete Adobe account.

How to log out of Lightroom on Mac?

Go to the CC app, select Help, and then click Sign Out and OK.

If I cancel my Adobe subscription will I lose everything?

Cancelation will restrict your access to Adobe creative applications and services.

How to cancel a Lightroom subscription on Android?

Go to your subscription list on your Google Play and then select Lightroom. Tap Cancel Subscription and then follow other on-screen instructions.

How to cancel a Microsoft Lightroom subscription?

Access Services and Subscription and then sign in with the Microsoft account you used when you subscribed to Lightroom. Look for the subscription, choose Manage, and then select Cancel.

How to cancel Lightroom mobile subscription?

Cancelling Lightroom mobile subscription depends on the operating system your phone has. Check how to cancel subscriptions on iPhone and Android above.

Final Words

Remember that plans and prices can vary from one part of the world to another, so make sure you check which subscription you have before making any decisions.

If you want to access Lightroom again, later on, you can sign up for a new membership at any time. Just keep in mind that you won’t get a refund for the cancellation fee.

If you want to continue using Lightroom on your smartphone, you can get a limited version of it for free.

As mentioned previously, the best alternative to Lightroom that doesn’t have a monthly subscription fee is Skylum Luminar (use code shotkit10neo) so try downloading it as a next step – don’t forget to use the code for a saving.

I hope this article clarified some of the haze that surrounds the cancelling of your Adobe subscription.