Today’s Question: I’m going to be traveling without internet access for a couple weeks. I want to be sure I won’t lose access to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop along the way. How long can I be offline before I lose access to these applications?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud plan with an annual commitment (even if you’re paying monthly) you have 129 days of offline access. For month-to-month plans (without an annual commitment) the grace period is limited to 30 days or less.
More Detail: Adobe requires that your license for Creative Cloud applications be validated periodically to confirm you have an active subscription. The software will check every 30 days and then will warn you if validation wasn’t possible. At that point you will then have a 99-day grace period before the software is unavailable or feature limited. This adds up to up to 129 days of offline use if you are on a plan with an annual commitment rather than a month-to-month plan.
With month-to-month plans the grace period is only 30 days. That grace period may also be further limited by other factors, such as where you purchased the software.
To maximize your offline access, you’ll want to validate your license with Adobe. My understanding is that the only way to do this (and therefore reset the clock for maximum offline access) is to sign out of the Creative Cloud application, and then sign in again.
You can read more details about offline access for Adobe applications on their website here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/kb/internet-connection-creative-cloud-apps.html
