Disabling PSE7 Backup/Sync

[larrymcg]

I do not want the backup/sync agent to do anything. I keep turning it off in preferences. But whenever I work on sharing an album it turns itself back on. Is that uncool or what?

So I have gone into the program files and renamed the PhotoshopElementsSyncAgent.exe to something else. So far I haven't gotten any error message when testing out album sharing and, amazingly enough, the agent does not get started.

Are there other side effects of renaming the agent to stop it from being started?

--Larry

[larrymcg]

I have discovered another side effect of renaming the PhotoshopElementsSyncAgent.exe so it can't be started.
That is, shared albums get created but they never go to Photoshop.com. That's perfectly fine with me although I didn't realize that the agent also did the uploading of the shared albums. I guess they define "Sync" to mean "upload".
But the shared album exists in a temp folder in a Windows temp folder. So, I can go there and get the shared album and ftp it to where I really want it. Success!

[ripple]

Hi Larry,

No, Sync is not just upload. I use this functionality and here are the details which might be helpful for you to understand this behavior.

- When you do Share to Photoshop.com it more that sharing that you see in different softwares. Here its live sharing that effectively means that if you have shared any Album with your friends and you keep working on album photographs, all the editing changes are synchronized to Photoshop.com and live changes are shared in this case. Please let me know in case there is still any doubt about this behavior.

- When you Share an Album to Photoshop.com through PSE. That Album remains in Sync always. Means: If you change anything on Photoshop.com, changes are synchronized to PSE and vice-versa. So Sync is not upload its about upload/download and synchronizing metadata related to your files.

- Why SyncAgent starts when mark an Album for Sharing:: Since this is Live Album Sharing we always need to keep shared albums in Sync between PSE & Photoshop.com. If you want to share to Photoshop.com, SyncAgent needs to run. If you will rename it, sharing to Photoshop.com will not work.

- My Opinion about the feature: I have been using this feature for some time and found this cool that I need not to worry about copying my changes from PSE to Photoshop.com because I work in PSE as well as Photoshop.om in random order and Sync feature helps me to keep my Online account and Desktop in Sync. Apart from that Live sharing experience is cool for a person like me who shares photographs and then do some editing to make them better.

- What I expect from Sync: I want to Sync my photographs between my Home and office machines. Multi-Machine Synchronization is not supported in PSE, but it worked for me in some rare cases where I wanted to Sync my office work files with Home machine for working at home.

Hope this will give some idea about the feature. I would like to answer more queries if you have.

Thanks,
Rip

[larrymcg]

Rip, I think what you described is exactly what I found via my experiments.

There are a couple reasons why I don't want the sync agent to do anything but I could avoid its actions only by renaming it.

* I don't want to share anything on Photoshop.com. I have my own web page where I share videos, music I record, photos, slideshows and lots of other stuff.

* When I upgraded from PSE5 to PSE7 I was surprised (and unhappy) to learn that "creations/galleries" had been eliminated. I had previously used the creation facility to generate simple, good looking slide shows for my web site. PSE5 would package the entire thing up in a folder and you just uploaded (or ftp'd) the entire folder to the web site.

* On-line Albums in PSE7 are very similar to PSE5 galleries (or slide shows). However, PSE7 does not provide a way to save the on-line albumn -- you can only share it or email it (edit: can't email an album). I don't want to share it on Photoshop.com. I want to share it on my own web site.

* So, now with the sync agent disabled, I can create a nice albumn and share it and no sharing happens. However, a temp folder is created that contains the albumn. So I grab the temp folder, rename it, and ftp it to my web site. Success!

Basically I take issue with Adobe deciding that the only thing I want to do with an album is to share it. They are being too restrictive and are pushing their sevices too much.

I should note that PSE7 does provide a way to ftp the album to a different web site (including mine). There are two issues with that. First, the only copy of the album then exists on the web site. I want the master copy to be on my PC and a copy on the web site. And second, the PSE7 ftp facility almost works. It gets the main folder and some of the first level files to the web site but it fails to get any of the album photos to the web site. Thus, it is useless.

Well, I've rambled on a bit but it should be clear why I don't have a need for Photoshop.com and I'm willing to kill the sync agent.

--Larry