Canon to take on Flickr with Project 1709 cloud image storage service
Canon have announced that they are to launch their own photo-hosting service to rival the likes of Flickr, launching today in a beta mode under the working title of Project 1709.
However, rather than take on perhaps the biggest photo-hosting site of them all, Facebook, and dedicated rivals Flickr and Picasa head-on, Project 1709 will instead aggregate images from the sites, and other destinations around the web.
The aim is to make Project 1709 a one-stop-shop for all your images, be they stored on social networks, device hard drives, other cloud services or networked NAS drives.
Pictures are displayed in a tiled format, alongside a customisable timeline ribbon, and features a tagging system to easily let you search potentially vast numbers of images spread across multiple locations.
As it’s from the Canon stable, Project 1709 also stores EXIF data for each image, tracking camera model, exposure time, ISO speed and aperture, which will be useful if you’re looking to recreate a style in a later photo. There will also be image recognition built in, with the option to remove duplicate images if you choose to do so.
Launching fully in February 2013, you can find out more about the service and sign up to try the beta mode by clicking here.
