API
Adobe
Adobe retires the Lightroom API (Firefly Services), directing users to Photoshop API v2
departs 31 Jul 2026
What this means for you
If you call the Lightroom API to do programmatic photo editing — auto-tone, presets, edits applied server-side as part of a pipeline — those calls stop working after 31 July 2026. Adobe warns of "service disruptions" for anyone who has not moved by then, so this is a hard cutoff, not a soft deprecation you can sit on.
Where to go
Adobe points everyone to the Photoshop API v2, which absorbs the image-editing surface, and publishes a migration guide alongside the deprecation notice. The two APIs are not drop-in identical — endpoints, request shapes and the editing model differ — so budget this as a rewrite of the integration, not a base-URL swap, and test against v2 before the date rather than after it.
- Adobe Photoshop API v2 (the vendor-recommended replacement)
Adobe’s Firefly Services expose a set of REST APIs for automating Creative Cloud editing without a person in Photoshop or Lightroom. One of them, the Lightroom API, is being retired: Adobe’s own developer documentation states it “will reach end-of-life (EoL) on July 31, 2026,” and tells customers to “migrate to Photoshop API v2 before August of 2026 to avoid service disruptions.”
This is a quieter sunset than a product shutdown — nobody’s photos disappear, and the Lightroom desktop and mobile apps are untouched. What ends is the programmatic path: teams that wired the Lightroom API into an automated pipeline (bulk edits, preset application, render steps) have eight days from this entry’s date to be running on the replacement.
The replacement exists and is named, which is the good case. The catch is that Photoshop API v2 is a different API, not a renamed one, so the work is a real migration. If you own an integration against the Lightroom API, the safe reading of “avoid service disruptions” is that calls will fail on 1 August, and the migration guide is the thing to open today.
Entry changelog
- — last reviewed.
- — Entry created from the official Adobe developer deprecation notice.
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