advertorial

Perhaps you are different, but I am not the most organised person when it comes to properly storing and making sense of my photo collection. Usually, I just load the photos from my digital camera and iPhone directly onto my laptop, but I never really take the time to organise them in any logical sense. We travel so much and take so many photos during these trips, that I now have over 60,000 photos organised about as well as a cat organises a ball of yarn: basically I’m just chasing things.

It has gotten progressively worse with Instagram Stories, because now I have pictures and videos on my iPhone as well – beside the ‘old’ chaos of hard drives, various computers and albums in shoeboxes around the house. And then I’m deliberately forgetting about the pictures I left at my parents’ house… A few weeks ago my external hard drive suffered a total meltdown and if it wasn’t for Mac expert Ed’s magic, I would have lost almost all of my files. This moment of truth got me thinking about storing at least my digital pictures in the cloud and create a system to organise all these memories as well.

CANON IRISTA //
In comes Canon irista, an online photo storage and sharing service that easily backs up and protects your precious moments in ‘a cloud-based environment’, as they call it. Uploading is simple and handy with tricks like automatically skipping duplicates. But what I especially like about irista, are the organisational tools that make it easier and faster for me to find photos. irista stores metadata (the EXIF data, for the data lovers) of all the pictures, including not only basic things like time and date, but also camera model and lens type used and even the focal lenght, aperture, shutter speed and so on. So when I want to recreate a certain effect, I can just check which lens and camera settings I used before. You can also add tags to create your own search filters, which really helps to organise your memories.

PRACTICAL FEATURES //
It’s important to note that irista not only supports Canon cameras, but every type of digital camera or camera phone. You might know that I use Canon cameras for my pictures, which is very practical because when you use a Canon camera, you can upload directly to irista – skipping the extra step of uploading from the camera to my computer.

Other features I really like are the possibility to upload RAW files (very large files that contain all the picture’s information) and the smooth integration with Adobe’s Lightroom, so you can upload and synchronise your Lightroom edits straight into irista. Note that irista offers direct sharing of pictures to Flickr and Facebook.

CUBA LIBRE //
My first project in irista was my recent trip to Cuba. This was such a magical trip where I took thousands of pictures because of the beautiful light, landscape and people. Through irista, it became an instant digital photo album that quickly highlights the best pictures for friends and family. Check it out >>> here. <<<

You are invited to test our irista yourself for free: there is a free option, no strings attached, that includes 15 Gigs of cloud storage without any limit on the number or size of your file uploads. Depending on your storage needs, you can upgrade and sign up for a monthly subscription.

I know organising your pictures doesn’t sound like a fun thing to do, but if you’ve ever lost your phone or melted your external hard drive like me, you’ll know that your pictures are just such a huge part of your life. Especially in these times, where you always have a phone on you and take pictures of your daily life, losing your pictures is like losing a part of your memory. Or in my case: like losing a part of my life.

Happy storing and organising!

X Merel