Canon offers a cloud just for still photos, not anything else. Weird Japanese camera and printer behemoth Canon has started up a cloud photo storage service called irista. We wrote about the service's pre-beta instantiation here. You can upload any size photo file, within the limits of your capacity entitlement obviously. You don’t get any editing tools and only stills are supported, not videos …
"Yeah, quite - what's it doing new that Flickr doesn't?"
Anyone who has ever read the T's and C's on Flickr could probably answer that. All Canon need do is not require your firstborn child in exchange for picture storage and they are winning. I'm not usually the kind of person to even read conditions of use, but somehow I've decided against Flickr several times due to their legal jibber jabber.
how about accidentally corrupt any images that have Exif data indicating that they were shot on:-
Apple,
Samsung,
Sony,
Nikon,
Panasonic,
Leica,
Red,
Olympus
etc
devices?
But the very small fine print (optically reduced by the imaging company) will tell you that you are giving them the rights to all your images for ever. (Just guessing and knowing Canon's Marketing Driven Doublespeak)
I decided to take a peek at Irista. The home page scrolls through a few introductory screens using large, friendly white '<' and '>' arrows on either side of the page. Cute, but when I try using the '<' to return to the home page, I consistently hit a 404 when my browser indicates I should be at the "SimpleToUse" page. Maybe I'll wait a couple of weeks to sign up...
"Thank you for visiting Project1709! The Australia and New Zealand site is currently undergoing testing and maintenance."
Lazy shmucks. Not only working with a limite handful of formats, they haven't learned the Internet actually works worldwide. Or, more likely they haven't learned enough about the Australian/New Zealand legal system to be able to convincingly screw this side of the pond as all.
I rarely want to upload more than stills, so Irista seemed a relatively good idea, with more free storage than Dropbox. I signed up and tried uploading half a dozen jpg photos. What a disaster! Took forever and ended up telling me that all uploads had failed, try again.While I appreciate that I maybe shouldn't complain about anything free, I have better things to do than spend all that time waiting for 'failure'.
What's the easiest way to get people to buy something they're already interested in, but don't really know what their options are? You label it 'professional' or for the 'advanced enthusiast'. You see it all the time in hand tools. Some general merchandise store that sells tools and they're all marked 'professional'. But few professional tools actually say 'professional' on them and aren't positioned as consumer tools. Key features and price make the difference between the consumer and true professional tools. Features and prices most consumers don't need and won't pay for.
At any rate, this isn't actually targeted at serious enthusiasts or professionals, or even moderately tech savvy users. This is an 'ecosystem' product aimed directly at the SLR crowd: The mid-upper middle class. The last time I read a market report (four-five years ago) on the consume photography industry the average SLR buyer was a 40+ year old professional who made $95k+ annual and were also the greatest purchasers of their camera manufacturers 'branded accessories' which all have crazy high margins (there's shit money in the camera bodies, it's like a game console or razor). The buyers like everything 'Canon' and will buy stuff they have no idea what it's for or how to use it, but it must be a good thing to have because the manufacturer wouldn't make it if it wasn't (Apple are many decades late to the 'ecosystem' party).
They'll buy this too. They're same people who buy all the accessories to go fly fishing a single time or all the stuff for backpacking and never use it again. Where they'll really buy it big is with a new camera purchase. Canon will surely offer an 'introductory' offer with each new camera and in the 'purchase orgasm they'll create an account and start using it and they won't ever change. They'll just keep if long after they've given the camera away, lost the camera in a move or sold it on eBay. Because that's what people do. They'll keep paying for something indefinitely if given the chance to do so. You just gotta get them started. Remember, the target audience won't even notice $10 monthly charges and Canon will continue getting paid for providing something the customer isn't using, which is nice revenue if you can get it.
..."They'll buy this too. They're same people who buy all the accessories to go fly fishing a single time or all the stuff for backpacking and never use it again. "
I love these people. All my cameras and sports gear comes through them. I buy nothing new.
A world full of mingy tight arses like me would look like Albania. Yuk
I'll stick with smugmug. I tried the various free services, didn't like their albums and/or spamminess. smugmug isn't free, but its cheap enough, offers unlimited storage for a annual fee, and has good looking albums without any restrictions on embedding. Combined with Adobe Lightroom as the photo editing/management tool, it totally rocks, a couple clicks to publish an album, fix a few pics in it later, one click republish.
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