Tyler Stalman digs into his wishlist for things he’d like to see hit the airwaves in the photography market in 2020. There are a lot of things I agree with here, but I found one wishlist item particularly interesting.

Way back when, I was on Candid with Marius and Álvaro and we had the opportunity to interview Josh Haftel of Adobe. It was a super fun episode for almost everyone involved to dig into some of the future of Adobe Lightroom.

I remember being particularly frustrated on this podcast, however. Adobe Lightroom CC had been around for a couple months (maybe a year? I can’t remember…) and it felt like the hip and cool new editing program on the block. Everything was in the cloud, you could sync all your photos and editing tools across platforms. You name it, Adobe Lightroom CC seemed like the program to have.

But, like everything at the time, I couldn’t adopt the program because of my petulant internet connection. At the time, I had a measly 5 MBPS down/0.5 MBPS connection, capable of uploading 1GB of photos over the course of a week, maybe. Anything cloud-based was effectively off-limits.

I asked Haftel if there were any considerations being made for those who simply didn’t have an internet connection to take advantage of the cloud-based features. And I remember being effectively snubbed for asking the question — my question was deemed to be short-sighted and not forward-looking enough to see a future where everyone had super fast internet.

Fast forward to January 6, 2020. I have fast internet now. Like, really fast internet. But do you? Does everyone?

According to Tyler Stalman, no professional photographers take Adobe Lightroom CC seriously because internet connections still aren’t capable of uploading a 64GB card’s worth of images in a reasonable amount of time. I get that I was a small nobody at the time (still am), but I wonder if Adobe would listen if a Youtuber like Stalman asked the same question I asked nearly two years ago?

Quite frankly, this is part of a larger problem. Once you have fast internet, you don’t think about what you used to have. Everything in my house operates almost instantaneously with our new connection and I yearn for more cloud-based features to make their way Adobe Lightroom CC. I don’t think at all about how I used to have to shoot compressed files, or delete half my photos so I didn’t fill up my local hard drives. Now, I have next to no bottlenecks.

But just because I don’t have bottlenecks doesn’t mean the working photographer in rural Saskatchewan or Nebraska or Croatia — who still doesn’t have a working copper internet connection, let alone fiber connection — doesn’t have bottlenecks.

I know big companies like Adobe are doing their best to weigh all the needs of all their users while still making investments for the long haul. But I remember being snubbed that day for what was a “short-sighted” question, when working creators need to pay their bills today, in the here and now.