I am growing tired of doing customer support work on behalf of Adobe / the Creative Cloud application. I receive probably 10-20x more emails from users of my plugin having problems with the Adobe platform itself, vs. having problems with my plugin.
Is Adobe doing anything to combat the frequent problem of plugins magically disappearing from users Photoshop / Creative Cloud application Plugins section despite having active subscriptions to them?
Thanks
Hi Anton… that’s not a good experience…
@rauchwer what would be needed to investigate this issue?
Some example emails:
EXAMPLE 1:
“It shows I’ve acquired it (see screenshots) but when I click manage nothing happens and it doesnt show up in the plugins tab. Help please I need it for an urgent project” —11/18/2025
EXAMPLE 2:
“Ive purchased [my plugin name] - after a free trial and im struggling to download it. Its not showing up in my manage plugins panel. Can you help please.“ —11/17/2025
EXAMPLE 3:
“Thanks for getting back to me! I did check the creative cloud, and its not even coming up in my plugins as well. Attached is a screenshot showing that its no longer there. I also reached out to [my support email address] but said to reach out to Adobe. Should I cancel and try to re-install it? However, I was just charged for this month. Would I be able to get a refund for this month when I cancel so I can try to re-enroll again?” —10/24/2025
(Note: The fix in this case was advising them to update Creative Cloud to the latest version: “Thanks so much for your help! Updating the creative cloud worked!“)
EXAMPLE 4:
“I am more than one year subscriber to your plugin but today it disappeared from photoshop
And it seems that I have to make again a subscription. I pay every month by PayPal with my monthly payment” —10/18/2025
EXAMPLE 5:
“I’m reaching out because my plugin was removed from Photoshop twice without any notice or explanation. Could you please help me understand why this happened and how to prevent it from being removed again?” —10/14/2025
Note that in almost all cases, when the problem is with Adobe applications themselves, I loop in the Adobe Exchange Support Team and oftentimes FastSpring Support as well via email. I have yet to see any clear and consistent root cause or solution identified for these problems. It’s just something that happens fairly frequently to plugin users based on the volume of emails I receive reporting these problems.
Are all those issues related to the subscription model?
Hi Anton,
So, these examples are good user stories, but right now the Marketplace doesn’t have a Product Manager to collect them.
For the engineering team to investigate they usually ask for Logs: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/apps/troubleshoot/diagnostics-repair-tools/run-log-collector-tool.html
I personally don’t get notified when the logs are uploaded. If a user uploads logs it’s helpful if they note the name of the ZXP the Log Collector generates and what date and time they upload it. If you’re working with the Exchange Support Team you can tell them to look in the portal for the log file.
The engineering team also likes screenshots and videos.
This is a pretty big ask for casual users of a Photoshop Plugin. Even for a technical software developer like myself that would sound like a huge pain and lots of hoops to jump through just to get basic customer/tech support. You’d think a company as large as Adobe would already have this kind of instrumentation built into its products so users aren’t required to manually download some LogCollector.exe package…
I re-read the page yesterday, and it’s better than it was last year. Previously the helpx page had users creating a blank file using the Terminal (!), which is a huge hurdle… I’m glad to see that step is gone.
So to clarify, unless I’m able to get the users having these problems to go through the extra steps of downloading that Log Collector program onto their machine, then sending the files to the Adobe Engineering Team, there’s not likely to be any progress on resolving the specific issues these users have been experiencing? Thanks.