Been using Adobe Creative Cloud for years, not just for myself, but my children as well. The price has increased over time, is what it is, that’s life in subscription software. Well, the price finally reached the tipping point where it has exceeded the value and I need to part ways.

I’ve got thousands of files my kids have drawn, taken, edited, etc. in the cloud drive. I’d never done it, but I “knew” you could set up Cloud Sync between a local folder and cloud folder, making it easy to access your files via desktop apps. I also knew I could download files, and assumed since the files allow for multi-select, you could download multiple files.

Well, 2025 is here and I need to actually perform these tasks. There’s plenty of 2020’s posts on the Adobe forums on how to do this. None of them work any longer. Adobe has slowly and deliberately removed every method of bulk download or bulk export over the past 18 months. You used to be able to accomplish this in several ways:

• Creative Cloud Sync – nope, not any more:

Note: Starting December 11, 2023, new users and organizations will not be entitled to Creative Cloud Synced files. Starting February 1, 2024, Creative Cloud Synced files will be discontinued for personal accounts that existed before December 11, 2023 (learn more here). Starting October 1, 2024, Creative Cloud Synced files will be discontinued for business accounts associated with organizations that existed before December 11, 2023 (learn more here).

• Reddit post suggested (web) Lightroom can do it: https://www.reddit.com/r/creativecloud/comments/11dkovs/how_do_i_saveexport_all_of_my_files_photos/?rdt=38838
  
  Not anymore
  
• Creative Cloud Desktop – used to be able to download in bulk, but now they’ve intentionally restricted it to ten files at a time.
  
• CC Desktop – “Make available offline”. I figured that must keep the downloaded version somewhere. Rather than really download the file as-is, they’ve undertaken a conscious effort to break the files into 100x various blobs of binary data spread throughout a large directory hierarchy under

~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CoreSync/cloudnative/DCX/#uuid#/1/v1/blobCode language: PHP (php)

For the first 300 files I set to make available offline, I ended up with 3748 directories and about 10,000 files, along with a thumbnail sized png of the real image, just to add an insulting reminder that I can’t get the real file.

Adobe can fuck off. I’m going to sacrifice the images rather than give them any further payments.