Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector: Creative Cloud asset preview fails with non-retryable Bartlebee 403

Start by tracing the Adobe connector flow from successful LightroomAsset discovery and its rendition path to the Bartlebee image-encoding request. Review the submitted connector logs and diagnostics if available, and compare the behavior with related issue #27842. Done means determining whether preview is supported for this account and either restoring encoding or returning a clear entitlement or support error.

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Codex App 26.715.72359 (CFBundleVersion=5718); bundled CLI codex-cli 0.144.4.

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Pro.

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 24.6.0 x86_64 i386

What issue are you seeing?

The Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector exposed in the native Codex macOS app successfully authenticates with a personal, non-SSO Adobe account and searches connected Creative Cloud assets. Using its Lightroom catalogue search capability, it locates the requested asset and returns its rendition path, but Codex cannot inspect or render that image because the downstream encoding request fails with:

{"type":"Unexpected","description":"image encode: could not connect to https://bartlebee.private.adobe.io/api/v1/image/encode — 403: Forbidden","retryable":false}

An immediate retry against the same rendition returns the identical non-retryable error.

This is not a request for a separate Lightroom connector and it is not a general connector-discovery or Adobe-login failure. The Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector is exposed in Codex, and its asset search succeeds in the same task immediately before the preview fails.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. In Codex Desktop on macOS, connect the Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector to a personal Adobe account containing Creative Cloud/Lightroom assets.
2. Ask Codex to locate a known image using the connector's asset-search capability.
3. Confirm the connector returns the requested LightroomAsset and its rendition path.
4. Ask Codex to inspect or preview the located image.
5. Observe the non-retryable 403: Forbidden response from https://bartlebee.private.adobe.io/api/v1/image/encode.
6. Retry the same preview once; it fails identically.

The failure has been reproduced independently on multiple dates, including a fresh read-only run with a recorded immediate retry.

What is the expected behavior?

Once the Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector has authenticated and discovered the Creative Cloud asset, Codex should be able to fetch and encode the returned rendition for visual inspection.

If this operation is not available to the account, Codex should not expose it as usable, or it should return a clear entitlement/support message rather than an internal Bartlebee 403 after successful discovery.

Additional information

• The same split is consistent across reproductions: Adobe connector authentication and asset search succeed; preview/image encoding fails.
• A screenshot and screen recording exist, but they are not attached publicly because they include private catalogue identifiers.
• Session diagnostics, connector logs, a contemporaneous reproduction record, and the screenshot were submitted through Codex’s diagnostic feedback uploader from the affected task and are available to OpenAI privately.
• Related but not identical: #27842 reports the same Adobe (formerly Photoshop) connector returning FORBIDDEN at a Photoshop tool invocation. This report concerns its asset discovery succeeding before a downstream Bartlebee image-encoding 403.