Over the weekend, Canon’s cloud media hosting platform, image.canon, suffered an outage that left users unable to login and use the service. No specific information was provided over the weekend, but we now know what went wrong.
In a statement shared on the image.canon homepage, Canon confirmed there’s been an issue with its long-term storage on image.canon that’s resulted in the loss of original image and video uploads. The full notice reads as follows:
Important Notice
Thank you for using image.canon.
On the 30th of July, we identified an issue within the 10GB long term storage on image.canon. Some of the original photo and video data files have been lost. We have confirmed that the still image thumbnails of the affected files have not been affected.
In order to conduct further review, we have temporarily suspended both the mobile app and web browser service of image.canon.
Information regarding the resumption of service and contact information for customer support will be made available soon.
There has been no leak of image data.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
To prevent any further issues, Canon has temporarily shut down both the mobile and web app versions of image.canon. Per the notice, we should have further updates ‘soon.’ We will update this article when further updates are provided.
DJI has lifted the veil on its latest commercial drone platform and its first hybrid camera series, the Matrice 300 RTK (M300 RTK) and the Zenmuse H20.
While the M300 RTK and Zenmuse H20 are both packed with features designed specifically for commercial use-cases, the systems feature a number of groundbreaking technologies and features that will inevitably make their way into more consumer-centric drones.
M300 RTK
The M300 RTK features a unique design with a top-mounted body and bottom-mounted blades, opposite of its 210 predecessors. This unique design allows advanced AI-powered technologies to get a more expansive overview of the environment for less obstructed viewing. The chunky array atop the drone features a six directional sensing and positioning system that offers a maximum object-detection range of up to 40m (130ft) horizontally, as well as an Anti-Collision Beacon for making the drone more visible in low-light environments. DJI has also included its AirSense (ADS-B) technology that will alert pilots if other aircraft or drones are nearby.
DJI has also improved its OcuSync Enterprise technology to enable triple-channel 1080p video transmission up to 15km (9.32m) thanks to its 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz connections, which will switch in real-time based on what offers the clearest connection.
Together these systems work together to power the Primary Flight Display (PFD) that ‘merges real-time flight and navigation data into one integrated display.’ Aside from the usual flight telemetry, the pilot will also see obstacle data and other details to ensure a proper flight path in tricky conditions.
The M300 RTK also features DJI’s new Advanced Dual Operator Mode, which gives two separate pilots equal access to flight controls, telemetry and other data. ‘Now, if one pilot becomes compromised or their controller loses battery or connection, the other pilot gains full control over the M300 RTK and its payloads,’ says DJI. This feature can also be used for training new pilots, where the teacher can take over control of the drone if need be.
When paired with the new Zenmuse H20 camera system, the M300 RTK will also offer two new means of syncing the drone’s location with objects of interest for more precise location tracking in coordinated missions, such as search-and-rescue operations and critical infrastructure repairs. The first is PinPoint, ‘a function that allows users to mark the subject of interest and instantly share the precise location data to a second operator or if necessary to ground teams via DJI FlightHub.’ The second method is Smart Track, ‘which allows users to automatically detect and track a moving object, even at extreme distances, while synchronizing the subject’s dynamic location in real time.’
The M300 RTK is capable of carrying up to three payloads—two on the bottom of the drone and one on the top. Below are a few product photos, including a trio of images showing one-, two- and three-camera setups.
Additional data collection tools include Live Mission Recording, AI-Spot Check and Waypoints 2.0. Below is a description of each of the three systems from DJI:
‘Live Mission Recording [is] for recording sample automated missions in real time; AI-Spot Check which enables data collection from exactly the same location every time, greatly improving the accuracy of automated missions. After photos from a sample waypoint inspection mission have been recorded, operators are able to mark the subject of interest. During subsequent automated flight missions, AI algorithms perform a comparison between the marked subject and current live view, thus correcting the camera orientation accordingly to deliver accurate and consistent results; and Waypoints 2.0 [is] an improved mission planning system offering up to 65,535 waypoints, while supporting an array of consecutive actions, 3rd party payloads, and more.’
DJI says the M300 RTK offers up to 55-minutes of flight time on a single battery, offers AES-256 Encryption of its data between the drone and its connected controllers, has IP45 Protection with an operating temperature window of -20 to 50° C (-4 to 120° F) and a self-heating battery when running in the lower temperatures.
Zenmuse H20
While the M300 RTK can be used with other payloads, including previous camera systems from DJI, the Zenmuse H20 series is designed to make the most of the new technologies inside DJI’s latest drone. The H20 series comes in two versions: the H20 and the H20T.
The H20 is a triple-sensor unit with a 20MP, 23x Hybrid Optical Zoom Camera, a 12MP Wide Camera and a Laser Range Finder that covers distances from 3–1200 meters (3–1312 yards). The H20T, on the other hand, adds an additional Radiometric Thermal Camera (640 x 512 pixels), that ‘allows operators to see what is invisible to the human eye thanks to high thermal sensitivity.’
DJI has also updated its Pilot app to make it easier to switch between the various sensors onboard the H20 series payloads and added a few new modes to make the most of the multi-camera array. One-Click Capture will capture photos or video from all three cameras simultaneously without having to switch between cameras mid-flight, as well as a Night Scene mode that will capture better low-light images when lighting conditions are less than ideal.
Both the M300 RTK and Zenmuse H20 series payloads are available to pre-order from authorized DJI Enterprise dealers. the first units are expected to ship in the second quarter of 2020.
The post Instaproofs Review: An All-In-One Platform to Sell Your Photography Online appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jackie Lamas.
Looking for a better way to share and sell your photos online? Then Instaproofs might be the right solution for you.
Whether you do in-person sales or online, Instaproofs can help you organize your sessions, sell products and prints, and even help with contracts. Read more about the platform in today’s article review.
What is Instaproofs?
Instaproofs is a subscription-based platform online that helps photographers use online galleries to sell products, prints, and digitals to their clients worldwide.
They have been around for 15 years and over time have improved their platform to offer beautifully-designed galleries, easy user-friendly cart systems, and create more avenues for photographers to earn more after completing their work.
The galleries are compatible with all devices.
They are similar to other services like Pixieset and require a monthly subscription. Although, they do have a free plan available for those who use online galleries for in-person sales and can work within the 3GB limit.
Here are the current monthly options for Instaproofs that you can choose from:
Key features
The key features that Instaproofs offers are:
Online gallery platform and shopping cart with custom pricing and products
Cloud storage
Contacts and invoicing
Mobile apps
Digital delivery
Reports
Multi-lingual
Marketing tools and email tracking
Managed accounts for multiple users
Migration services from previous online gallery service (extra charge for this $ 3 per gallery).
Lab fulfillment services
Watermarking
Quick payments through Stripe
The service also offers a 14-day free trial so you can poke around and see if it’s right for you and your business.
In-Depth Review
Galleries
These three the are the biggest features that Instaproofs provides. Whether you are a digital delivery photographer or focus more on prints, there are endless features that you can take advantage of to get you more sales.
The gallery homepage can feature all of your galleries or you can choose to hide some. Add passwords and require emails to sign in. It’s fully customizable for each gallery depending on your needs.
The online galleries support high-resolution images up to 50MB per image making sure that you’re able to offer your clients the best image quality available for their images. You’re also able to upload smaller resolution images if you’re looking to present the images during in-person sales. This can save you storage space the monthly plan.
The dashboard will let you customize the views and windows. You can see right away how much storage space you have left, how many galleries are active, and the number of images you have uploaded.
The galleries also have the option of choosing the image you want to be featured for the entire gallery as well as category featured images which can be different. You’re also able to upload the HTML code for a video slideshow if you’ve created one – all to captivate your clients right from the start.
The star shows the images you have chosen as featured and will show as the cover for the gallery.
When setting up your galleries, you have all the options in the same window so that you can set up the purchase minimum, slideshow music, whether you want the photos to display mostly horizontal or vertical, choose a price list for the gallery, and categories.
Currently, they’ve added the option to upload to multiple categories simultaneously for faster uploads making it easier to organize and categorize the images for your clients.
Adding custom links and music to the slideshows is also a great way to engage your clients during the selling process. Another great plugin: Direct uploading from Aperture, Lightroom, or FTP applications.
Not into selling digitals? You don’t have to. The galleries offer the photographer to have a minimum purchase amount, offer only web-sized digitals or only watermarked digital images.
You have full control over how you want to set up each individual gallery. You can give your clients permission to hide images, download all, or none, and a customized link. You can also have guests who enter the link to only be able to purchase images and not download at all. Each gallery is personalized as much or as little as you want.
From the galleries, you’re able to create mobile apps that hold 50 images from a particular gallery. You can also make one without a pre-existing gallery, where the client can save the mobile app onto their smartphone and have 50 images to view and share on the go! Especially useful to do sneak peeks/previews.
Shopping cart and selling
Instaproofs’ motto is “Sell more prints” and that is exactly what they aim for. More than a digital delivery service, they make it really user friendly for photographers to set up price sheets, sales, coupons, and products to the storefront for clients to purchase.
You can also choose to create add-ons so that you can maximize the sale. Rather than just selling a print, you can also add on the frame and offer your clients more value for their purchases.
When creating the shopping cart, you can also use lab pricing and a certain markup percentage to make it easier to set pricing. This can be really useful for beginner photographers who are getting into selling products and don’t really know how to go about pricing their prints and products.
From the cart, you can activate whether you’ll want to sell prints in black and white and/or sepia. This is a preference and each photographer can set up the cart as they wish.
There are many features to the shopping cart that gives the photographer full control of what to sell, how many, bulk pricing, options for black and white or sepia, cropping to help clients crop properly, lab fulfillment, pricing sheets, discounts, sales, coupons, promotions, and much more.
It’s a complete selling platform for you and user friendly for your clients. You will need a Stripe account in order to activate the storefront in order to get paid.
These are the professional lab partners that offer print fulfillment through the online gallery.
Contracts and invoicing
Instaproofs have added contracts and invoicing to their services and allows photographers to create their own contracts or use a pre-made template.
Choose templates for weddings, portraits, model releases for both adults and minors, independent contractor agreement (freelance work or similar) or you can make your own.
Just fill in the fields and required information, then choose to save a draft or finalize and send it to your client for signature.
Right from the contracts window, you are also able to create an invoice for your client by filling in the information fields for the invoice.
You can also choose an online gallery for the invoice in the event that you’ve already made a gallery.
Choose to attach the contract to the invoice, add an auto-reminder, and save your invoices as templates for future use.
Reports
Another great feature for photographers is to get reports of what you’re selling, products most purchased, email deliveries, and much more. This can be really great to see how your business is doing year to year.
Pros and cons
The biggest pro for signing up with Instaproofs is the number of features it offers photographers all from the same platform. Meaning, you don’t have to use different services to send gallery invites, emails including cart and expiration reminders.
The service allows photographers to ultimately customize the entire interface from adding your logo to the galleries, custom links, custom products, and print options, add-ons, and pricing sheets.
Instaproofs also has a referral program that gives existing users the opportunity to get more storage (2gb per referral) when a photographer signs up and says you sent them. It’s a great incentive if you’re a satisfied customer.
The con may be the price and limited galleries in the free and basic options.
There is also a commission fee for the free option and limited cloud storage.
We’ve rounded other top services so you can compare them and determine which is best for your business.
Instaproofs leads in cloud storage in the bottom level monthly subscriptions but doesn’t offer an unlimited version for companies with a higher volume. Which is a big con if you’re a multi-photographer studio that needs unlimited galleries and storage space for high resolution selling and viewing.
Sharing to social media or via email is really quick and easy for your clients.
Also, it’s important to note that Instaproofs isn’t an online archiving site and so if you’re looking for a service that backs up your digital files, you might want to look elsewhere. It’s primarily for uploading client photos and selling photo products.
Conclusion
Instaproofs has a lot of features that aren’t just bells and whistles. Many of the top photographers like Jonathan Canlas, Laura Murray, and Abby Grace use Instaproofs for their own businesses.
The slideshow feature allows you to set music and wow clients.
Having an all-in-one platform for both product-based photographers and digital format photographers, with customization in all of their features, gives you a great advantage in generating more sales and offering a beautiful and easy to use interface for your clients to view, enjoy, share, and buy their images.
With a 14 day free trial, you can try it out yourself and see if it’s the right service for you and your photography business.
The post Instaproofs Review: An All-In-One Platform to Sell Your Photography Online appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Jackie Lamas.
Moment has revealed it’s discontinued the Android version of its Pro Camera mobile app. The reason, according to a statement shared on Moment’s help website, is the difficulty involved in supporting a wide variety of Android devices from different manufacturers, otherwise referred to as fragmentation.
A number of issues compelled Moment to discontinue Pro Camera for Android, the company said in a statement. ‘The short is that phone makers like to create their own flavor of Android, each with different amounts of access to select camera features,’ Moment said. ‘The result has been a random compatibility list where each phone has different features in the app by phone model.’
Moment explains that it repeatedly asked phone manufacturers to make their camera features available to the developer and to share the list of the changes they made to the devices. On top of that, each new Android update released by these companies ‘breaks these custom modifications,’ making things more difficult for developers.
Ultimately, Moment says that it does not have ‘the engineering bandwidth’ to continue supporting this app, but that it will continue to make it available in the Google Play Store, where it is sold for $ 4. The app currently has a low rating of 2.4 out of 5 stars, with users complaining about bugs and missing features.
Canon has launched a new cloud-based image platform designed for use by select Canon device owners. With the new image.canon service, photographers can have images automatically forwarded from their camera to their computer, mobile device and supported third-party services like Google Drive. The service is free to use and stores images on Canon’s own server.
Put simply, image.canon allows some Canon camera and SELPHY printer owners to register a Canon ID and then use the service to wirelessly transfer images from their supported device to Canon’s cloud platform. From there, the images can then be forwarded to third-party services, a computer and mobile devices.
The platform supports all of the image formats offered by compatible Canon cameras; users can connect an unlimited number of cameras to the service. Likewise, Canon doesn’t have any restrictions on image size or the number of images that can be transferred, though the company says there may be instances where uploads are restricted for ‘operational reasons.’
Image.canon stores the uploaded original images for 30 days, after which they will be deleted from the server. Thumbnails of the images will remain and only be deleted if the user doesn’t use the service for an entire year. The company also offers users 10GB for long-term image storage beyond 30 days. Support for forwarding images to Adobe Creative Cloud and Google Photos won’t arrive until later this summer.
Canon’s new cloud service will officially launch in April 2020.
Back in October, Canon announced it was shutting down its cloud-based photo platform, Irista. Today is the final day the platform will be live, so if you have any photographs still on the platform that you would like to download, you will need to do so by the end of the day, as the platform will no longer be accessible after today.
As noted in our original coverage, all of your photos can be downloaded as a ZIP folder using the ‘Download Your Photos’ link on the Irista homepage. It’s worth reiterating too that none of the tags, photo ratings, titles or albums you have assigned to the images will be downloaded alongside the images.
Canon has announced it’ll be shutting down its cloud-based photo storage platform, Irista, on January 31, 2020.
Launched back in 2014, Irista served as an online solution for managing, sharing and printing photos ‘without compromising on quality,’ in Canon’s own words. In addition to the browser, Irista was also accessible via Android and iOS apps.
The shutdown message on Irista’s homepage reads:
Sadly, we’ve decided to close Irista on January 31, 2020. You can continue to access to your photos until the service closes. Please sign in to download them before this date.
In a thorough FAQ page, Canon says all photos and personal data will be removed from its servers on January 31, 2020. Any photos hosted on Irista can be downloaded ahead of time using the ‘Download Your Photos’ link on the Irista homepage. Your photos will be compressed into a ZIP folder and downloaded to your computer, but Canon notes organization methods, such as tags, photo ratings, titles and albums won’t be included with the download, so that information will need to be re-applied afterwards.
Shared albums will still be viewable until the shutdown date, but no new users can be invited to the albums in the meantime. The Irista photo book service will still be in operation through the shutdown date as well.
You can find out more details and information by visiting the Canon Irista FAQ page.
Following a report late last month from Variety that claimed Disney layoffs would impact National Geographic, NatGeo has officially shuttered its ‘Your Shot’ platform. The announcement was made on the National Geographic website’s ‘Your Shot’ page, where a new notice advises photographers that the program will now take place through the company’s ‘Your Shot’ feed on Instagram.
The National Geographic ‘Your Shot’ platform was a photo community that offered photographers advice from experts, as well as assignments, the opportunity to get one’s work featured on digital and print platforms, and to engage with the wider community of photographers.
According to the notice on the National Geographic website (above), the ‘Your Shot’ platform will be shuttered on October 31, after which point all of the assignments, promotions, and engagement opportunities will be discontinued. Photographers will be able to find the continued version of the platform on the National Geographic Instagram Your Shot account.
Though the message suggests that the ‘Your Shot’ program will continue with assignments on Instagram, both the National Geographic website and the company’s Instagram account lack details on how the process will proceed beyond October 31. Users of the current ‘Your Photo’ platform will soon receive the ability to download their images from the community before it closes next month.
Peer-to-peer equipment rental platform KitSplit has expanded its insurance cover for equipment owners. Gear that is rented out via the platform is now also covered for theft by the renter, in addition to previous coverage which included damage, loss and theft from the renter.
‘The trust of our community and the safety of their gear is of utmost importance to us. With the Owner Guarantee, and our improved vetting, we are excited to give our owners even more peace of mind, ” said Lisbeth Kaufman, CEO and co-founder of KitSplit. ‘Trust has been a focus of ours from day one, and we’re excited to build the safest way to rent cameras in the industry.’
Previously theft from the renter, or ‘voluntary parting’ as it is called in the industry, was excluded from coverage which according to KitSplit is industry standard. KitSplit says that in the past voluntary parting on KitSplit has been very rare at about one case in 5000 rental transactions. Still, when it happened the consequences for equipment owners could be very painful.
In addition to the expanded insurance coverage, the company uses a proprietary 40 point risk vetting system to ensure only trustworthy professionals can offer and rent equipment on the platform. You can find more information on the KitSplit website.
Online photography community 500px has alerted one of its most prominent users, Polish photo artist Michal Karcz, that his work is no longer welcome on the platform. According to a post Karcz published on Facebook, 500px warned the artist that ‘non-photographic content’ on his account is now in violation of the company’s Terms of Service.
The decision to ban Karcz’s digital artwork highlights a major change in policy for 500px, which historically not only welcomed Karcz’s work, but also repeatedly praised it with multiple ‘Editor’s Choice’ and ‘Year’s Best’ designations. According to Karcz’s Facebook post, his work on 500px has received more than 7 million views, 168k ‘Affections,’ and his account has nearly 35,000 followers.
One of the photo illustrations Karcz shared on his 500px account. Used with permission
Karcz’s was declared a ‘Photoshop master’ in an article 500px published on its blog to showcase his work. The content blends photography and digital art to present viewers with unique, in some cases other-worldly, images of reality. These same images are now in violation of the 500px guidelines, a representative clarified to Karcz in a second message:
Hi there, Unfortunately photomanipulations based on photography is not photography and our website in the current iteration is evolving into a purely photography website. Not only that, our terms of service require you to be the copyright owner of the images you upload so if you’re editing bits and pieces of other peoples imagery then you’re in violation of that. I personally am a fan of your artwork but unfortunately it doesn’t fit within the conditions of our site at the moment.
Another photo illustration Karcz shared on his 500px account. Used with permission.
Karcz’s 500px account is still live on the service at this time and still features the same ‘non-photographic content.’ It’s unclear whether the account will be deleted, but Karcz’s work remains live on Facebook and his personal website.
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