There are millions of Adobe’s customers who haven’t and perhaps won’t ever sign up to the Creative Cloud (I haven’t so far but may reluctantly do so). Back in May, 700,000 had decided it was the right choice for them and had chosen to subscribe, and while you can put a positive spin on Adobe now reaching 1 million subscribers (see FY2013 Q3 financial presentations) , you could also say that they’ve only put on another 300k since they denied customers any choice. That leaves 7 million Creative Suite customers to go, and for them life goes on.

One of those is a good friend who has always been a loyal Adobe customer and stayed up-to-date with Photoshop and Lightroom. He’s upgraded to every version but usually once he has seen a new tool which he believes he will use, and he sees little point subscribing to CC for its own sake and trusting Adobe will eventually introduce a feature he wants. His main computer is quite new, the operating system equally up-to-date, and I’m sure he’s not unusual in being perfectly happy continuing with CS6.

But while you may think it’ll be years before you can no longer run CS6, bumps in the road may come sooner than you imagine. In his case it was a pleasant surprise – someone offered him a new laptop – but he couldn’t find how to download it from Adobe and after wasting a couple of hours’ valuable time he was in a panic and called John.

You know, SNAG-0003I’m really not surprised he found it difficult. I thought I knew my way around Adobe’s site and I don’t think they have deliberately hidden links to CS6, they’ve not gone out of their way to make it easy to download if you already own the software. It took me a quarter of an hour flapping around, looking at “my products”, following various CS6 links, and getting nowhere. Eventually I found it:

  • Look for the “Sign In” link on the right of the Adobe page and log into your Adobe account.
  • Then on the right hand side, look for the “Welcome, Your Name”  link.
  • It has a menu – go into My Orders.
  • In your order history, you should see your order for CS6 and a Download link is on the right.