Canon has launched its own cloud storage platform called Irista

Canon has quietly launched a new online photo storage and sharing service that is free for anyone to use worldwide. Called Irista, the new photo service offers a free option that includes 10GB of cloud storage with no limits on the number or size of your file uploads. Irista also offers paid options for extra storage, but currently that option is available only in Europe. Canon began developing Irista in 2012 under the name “Project1709.” Irista is very bare bones compared to other services such as Dropbox, Flickr, or OneDrive. It is also exclusively a photo storage site with no options to save other types of files.

Canon has its head in the cloud with Irista, a new online storage service for saving your photos. Irista – pronounced eye-RIST-ta, I’m reliably informed by a Canon spokesperson — takes on other cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive or iCloud. Unlike those other services however, it only stores photos. There are no file-size limitations and Irista can automatically sync new snaps to image collections. You can tag photos and search by different criteria including the time or location when a photo was shot, or even the type of lens used. To show off your snaps, you can share them on Facebook and Flickr and even see the subsequent comments within the Irista interface. There’s no sign of hipper services like Instagram or Twitter though. Intriguingly code-named Project1709 during development, Irista is perhaps a little late to the party. It doesn’t have any editing options, which means apart from a nice interface for browsing snaps, it doesn’t do anything that Dropbox et al already do. In fact, because it only allows photos — jpeg and raw files — Irista is less useful than Dropbox for storing files.