Canon Is Shutting down Irista

Photography
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Canon started Irista around 2014 as an alternative to photo sharing sites like Flickr or Dropbox. Yeah, I know. Dropbox isn’t primarily aimed as a photo-sharing platform but it handles the job well if you use it for that. Canon started integrating Irista in many Wi-Fi capable devices to directly upload pictures to the cloud.

Unfortunately the service never really took off. It had fewer features than Flickr but they had good options to print photo books from your uploaded images. The interface was plain and simple, which made it perfect for everyone.

Irista had an option to import your Flickr photos to the service via the web. This would save you the step from downloading everything to your PC and then reuploading it. This service never really worked well. It started importing a few hundred of thousands of pictures I had on Flickr. The developers never could really figure out why my stuff wouldn’t transfer over. I was thinking about changing from Flickr, where I am still a PRO member, to Irista. Flickr was back then the go-to platform for photographers and artists to share their work.

One of the biggest reasons for that is, that Flickr is independent and not a product from a camera manufacturer. Even tho Irista supported most RAW files, even from other manufacturers besides Canon, it would just look weird if a bunch of Nikon, Olympus and other people now run around with a Canon Account. On the other side, Canon has a pretty big market share in the photography sector. One of the best tools Canon added to Irista was the cloud-editing of your photos. Don’t expect an Adobe Lightroom competitor but you could do some basic edits.

Read more: SmugMug buys Flickr

Now, over 5 years later, Canon is pulling the plug from Irista. January 31, 2020, is the last day of Irista. Until then you have time to download all your photos. After that, your Irista account, photos and all personal information related to Irista will be deleted. Don’t worry your Canon ID will stay intact and you will still be able to use it with other Canon services past January 31, 2020. If you still plan to get photo books from Irista, you have until January 14, 2020.

For more information, check Irista’s FAQ page.

If you ever signed up for Irista, even if you didn’t use it, keep your eyes open for an email from Canon. The email will inform you about the shutdown of the service but also comes with a voucher code for two free months of Adobe Lightroom and 1 TB of Adobe Cloud storage. So you can start moving your files over to the Adobe Cloud. Unfortunately after two months, you have to start paying Adobe, where Irista was a free service, with options to buy more storage.

Conclusion

It’s sad when you read about shutdowns of websites and services. This means that the service didn’t work out as planned and just wasn’t profitable. To be honest, I won’t miss Irista at all, but I am sure there were people out there using it as their go-to platform for their photos.

Have you used Irista?

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