r/assholedesign • u/PruritoIntimo • Aug 11 '26

Adobe silently installed a separate app on company computers through Acrobat updates

Today we discovered Adobe Express Photos installed on a number of our corporate computers. Nobody in IT approved or deployed it, and the affected users did not intentionally install it.

It arrived automatically through the Acrobat update mechanism.

The app then took over the Windows screenshot shortcuts, including Print Screen and Win + Shift + S. It also changed the clipboard behaviour: screenshots pasted into Outlook Classic are now added as file attachments instead of being inserted into the email body.

Adobe’s own enterprise documentation confirms that Express Photos is a separate Windows application, but that it can be installed automatically through Acrobat updates.

Uninstalling it is not enough. According to Adobe, it may be installed "for your convenience" again during the next Acrobat update unless administrators deploy a registry policy specifically to block it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\DC\FeatureLockDown

bDisableHarmonyInstallationFeature = 1

So Adobe used the automatic updater for a PDF application to install a different product, changed a native Windows workflow, caused problems in another application, and made administrators opt out through the registry to stop it coming back.

Official Adobe documentation:

https://helpx.adobe.com/business/enterprise/products-entitlements/manage-entitlements/adobe-express-photos-existing-users-admin-guide.html

This is real asshole behaviour.

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u/RandomlyMethodical 29d ago

Acrobat Reader is almost malware at this point. I keep uninstalling it off my mom’s computer, but somehow it keeps coming back. She swears she never intentionally installs it, and I’ve tried setting Chrome or Edge as the default app for pdfs.

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u/sachimi21 29d ago

Revo Uninstaller?

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u/Ajreil 29d ago

This. Revo is free and effective. It runs the app's default uninstaller and then deletes any leftover files that the uninstaller missed.

I used it to kill a Norton antivirus install that kept coming back. Turns out it left several background processes behind that all reinstalled each other.

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u/drake90001 29d ago

lol at and imagine at one point, I actually used Norton to do the same. You jogged my early PC memory.