Today’s Question: If you cancel your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and several months later want to renew it will you be charged for the intervening time?
Tim’s Quick Answer: No, if you cancel your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription and later restart your subscription, you won’t be charged for the time during which your subscription was inactive.
More Detail: Provided you have saved all of your photos and the information about your photos (such as a Lightroom catalog) to your own local storage (rather than in the cloud), there isn’t any real risk of losing data when you cancel your Creative Cloud subscription.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that if you are using the synchronization features (such as with Lightroom CC for mobile devices, or the cloud-synchronization service with Lightroom on the desktop), that the synchronized images and galleries will no longer be available once you cancel your subscription. So, again, you would want to be sure you have all of your data stored locally before canceling your subscription.
As noted in a previous edition of the Ask Tim Grey eNewsletter, it is also possible to continue using Lightroom Classic CC after canceling your Creative Cloud subscription. Just note that certain features (such as the Develop and Map modules) will no longer function in this case.
If you later restart a Creative Cloud subscription, naturally the rate you had been paying previously might not be available any longer. So you might have no choice but to sign up at a higher price point. But you would not have to pay for the time period that your subscription was inactive. And if you properly saved all of your photos and data locally, you would be able to essentially pick up right where you left off in terms of managing your photos.