I see that if you have SW pro or higher you have access to at least Visualize std. But if your subscription expires than you lose Visualize. ie you don't have a perennial licence for photo rendering package, it is a software lease.

Was that true of Photoview 360 as well?

The old question occurs again. What happens to our IP if SW as a product ends life and switches their servers off? Obviously all the photorendering cabilility at least is lost.

I have never had a sensible answer from solidworks on anything regarding "end of product life" and related subjects.

The fact they were willing to kill WPDM with all our data locked inside it without providing a cost free data migration does nothing to assure me that they take this future legacy data access subject seriously. "Don't worry we are always going to be here" is not a satisfactory answer when we have lost access to data that was in obsoleted cad several times over in our careers.

Applicon Brovo was always going to be there too, as was Designwave (which became prodesktop and then vanished), only the data I had as DXF is still accessible.

And yes I still sometimes refer to legacy data I created as the first full time employee of the company I work for now.