Canon Branches Out, Launches Its Own Photo Storage Cloud

Canon, one of the world’s best-known photography brands, has launched a new, freemium cloud storage service for retaining photos.

The new app, Irista (pronounced eye-RIST-ta) jumps headlong into a shark’s tank of competitors such as Box, Dropbox, EMC Mozy, Microsoft SkyDrive, Google Drive, Apple iCloud and several others. This cloud service, however, stores only JPGs and raw-format photos, so if users want to drop in a document, video or something else, Irista isn’t going to welcome it.

Users can upload a photo of any digital weight into Irista and it will automatically sync new entries into specific image collections. You can tag photos as in Facebook and search collections by different metrics, including the names of people in the photo, time of day or location where a photo was shot. However, do all your photo editing first because you cannot change the file with Irista tools: It doesn’t offer any.

Irista also syncs with Flickr and Facebook for posting in those services. You don’t need to own a Canon camera or other product (they also make scanners and copiers, among others) to register and use the service.

Irista is available now. The service is free for up to 10GB of storage. If you’d like more capacity, the pricing is as follows: 50GB costs $7 per month or $75 per year; 100GB costs $15 per month or $170 per year.