Just a few months after it launched, Canon’s image.canon cloud platform has had to temporarily shut down after an issue caused the loss of some users’ photo and video files.
The service went down on 30 July and now Canon has provided an explanation, saying “we identified an issue within the 10GB long term storage on image.canon” and that “some of the original photo and video data files have been lost”. It’s not yet clear how widespread the issue is, so we’ve asked Canon UK for clarification.
The image.canon platform is mainly designed to act as a temporary bridge between your Canon camera and permanent backup solutions like Google Drive, but also offers 10GB or permanent storage for your most important snaps and videos.
According to Canon’s statement on image.canon, it’s this 10GB storage that’s been affected by the issue. As a result, Canon says “we have temporarily suspended both the mobile app and web browser service of image.canon”.
Canon added that “there has been no leak of image data” and that “we have confirmed that the still image thumbnails of the affected files have not been affected”, although that’s unlikely to be much consolation to the affected users.
Right now, Canon is conducting a review and sounds optimistic that the issues will be a temporary, saying “information regarding the resumption of service and contact information for customer support will be made available soon”.
While there’s never a good time for cloud platform to get an issues like this, it’s perhaps fortunate that it’s happened to image.canon so soon after it’s launched, before too many users were affected.
Get off this cloud
The idea behind image.canon is certainly a solid one, in theory – the service automatically connects your Canon camera to the cloud (as long as it’s a supported model), and transfers all your photos and movies (including raw files and 4K videos) to a temporary library for 30 days.
From here, you can either transfer them to other services, including Google Drive, Google Photos and Adobe Creative Cloud, or chuck the most important ones into that 10GB permanent storage. But Canon will need to find a quick fix to the latter if people are going to trust it with their most important memories.
The fact that image.canon is more of a replacement for the discontinued ‘Canon Image Gateway’, which helped you upload media to the cloud, rather than its Irista cloud storage service, means this issue isn’t quite as serious as an equivalent one would be for the likes of Google Photos.
But it is a blow for service that’s only just launched and for Canon too, which has recently been fending off overheating claims about the new Canon EOS R5 and clarifying that it won’t need to be recalled.
We’ll update this story with some more official information as soon we get it.