PSE-8 No Trial Expiration of Organizer Only....

Question

I have seen it mentined in the PSA (Photoshop Album) forum, that since PSA is going to be discontinued the Organizer portion of PSE-8 will NOT expire after the trial period ends. So.....
Is this only open to current users of PSA, or can even current owners of other versions of PSE take "advantage" of this offer?
How much advertising "abuse" er, rather, continued advertising, (nag messaging) will be connected with the installation?
Would it actually be worthwhile to "subject" your computer to PSE-8 in the first place?

Answer 1

Is this only open to current users of PSA, or can even current owners of other versions of PSE take "advantage" of this offer?
A couple of Adobe employees have posted here that the Organizer in the PSE 8 30-day trial does not expire and that thus the Organizer is "free". They didn't mention anything about this be limited to upgrades from previous versions, and PSE has never had such checks in its registration or activiation.  So I'd bet that anyone who gets the trial will be able to use the Organizer indefinitely.   I'd like to see someone post authoritatively on this issue -- I certainly wouldn't completely trust the Adobe employees' comments, based on the quality of their contributions here (except for Bob Gage, the product manager).
I'm seriously wondering if PSE 8 will be the last version of the Organizer.  Adobe has been radically reducing its investment in the Organizer the last several years, moving development offshore to save costs, not fixing most bugs, adding just a few cosmetic features for marketing purposes, etc.  (Note that there are world-class engineers offshore, including India, but when a company like Adobe moves development offshore to save costs, they're almost by definition getting low-quality engineering.) And in PSE 8, Adobe has done some curious things with the Organizer: Renaming it to "Elements Organizer", separating the installation folders, separating the user guides, renaming the commands that invoke the editor.  Well-placed rumors from inside Adobe continue to suggest that the company is moving away from consumer products back to its core, products for professionals.  Is this unbundling of the Organizer in preparation of trying to sell it or terminate it?
How much advertising "abuse" er, rather, continued advertising, (nag messaging) will be connected with the installation?
The PSE Welcome screen presents annoying marketing for Adobe products but not advertising for other companies or products.  It's easy to avoid the Welcome screen by making shortcuts direclty to the Organizer, and the Welcome screen doesn't provide any functionality that isn't easily accessible elsewhere.
Would it actually be worthwhile to "subject" your computer to PSE-8 in the first place?
If you have an early version of PSA or PSE, I definitely recommend upgrading to a later version, PSE 6 or later. Two reasons:
- If you anticipate staying with the PSE Organizer, then each newer version of PSE makes it harder to upgrade from PSA. As it is now, many users of PSA find they first have to convert their catalog to PSE 5 (using a free 30-day trial that is time-limited) and then to PSE 8.  Adobe has made no effort to help such users convert.   Each year that goes by makes it less likely you'll be able to upgrade.
- If you anticipate moving out of the PSA/PSE Organizer world, then you'll need to have all the metadata from the catalog (tags, albums, captions, notes, dates, star rating, etc.) written into the photos so that other programs can read it.   All versions of PSA/PSE have significant bugs, which strike some users more than others depending on your cameras, scanners, and workflow.  With PSE 6 and later, you can use my utility psedbtool to get all that metadata correctly written to the photos (and optionally into text files), making it much more likely you won't lose data.   Unfortunately, psedbtool doesn't work with earlier versions.