Canon Irista

» see irista.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Canon revealed Irista on 5 June 2014 as an image management platform for people who took photography seriously enough to resent how general-purpose cloud storage treated their files. The complaint was legitimate. Dropbox and Google Drive would hold a RAW file the way they would hold a zip archive, as an opaque lump of bytes, and give you nothing useful on top of it. Irista read RAW natively, imposed no limit on individual file sizes, and organized around the metadata a camera actually writes.

Pricing was European in both currency and structure. Ten gigabytes cost nothing, with the full feature set attached, so a hobbyist could use it indefinitely without paying. Fifty gigabytes ran 4.99 euros a month or 49 euros for the year, and a hundred gigabytes ran 10.99 a month or 109 annually. That last figure is the number worth sitting with, because Google Drive was selling a terabyte for ten dollars a month in 2014 and Google Photos would start giving away unlimited compressed storage in 2015.

The press reaction was polite confusion. The Register ran it under a headline that simply observed Canon had built a cloud for still photographs and nothing else, and ended on the word "weird". That is an unkind summary and a fair one. Irista was a camera manufacturer looking at the subscription economy and reaching for the one asset it had, which was knowing more about image files than Dropbox did.

~ the dossier ~

~ project 1709 ~

Before it had a name it was Project 1709, a Canon beta that invited photographers in to test a hosted library. The number has never been explained publicly and reads like an internal reference that escaped. It is a small detail, but it tells you the thing was built as a research bet inside a hardware company rather than as a product somebody had sold to a board.

Canon Europe owned it, which is why the euro pricing never grew a proper dollar or lira equivalent, and which is most of the reason I never touched it. A storage service you pay for in a foreign currency, attached to a camera brand rather than to the device you already carry, is a difficult sell anywhere the bank charges you for the conversion.

~ what you could not take with you ~

Canon gave notice on 29 October 2019 and set the end at 31 January 2020. The instructions were clear: sign in before the date, find the new link beside "Download All Photos & Videos", and your library would arrive as a zip file. On the closing date every account's details and contents were wiped.

The trap was in what the zip contained. Your photographs came home. The work you had done on top of them did not, because neither your ratings nor your album structure was ever part of the export format. Anyone who had spent five years curating inside Irista got back a flat pile of files and lost the arrangement, which is the specific cruelty of a photo service dying rather than a disk failing. A disk at least fails without a migration guide.

~ the parting gift ~

Canon's exit present was a promotional code from Adobe, good for two free months of one terabyte of Lightroom cloud storage. It was a sensible place to send people and a slightly deflating end, because it amounts to a camera company conceding that the software company should handle this part. Canon has not launched a consumer cloud since.

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