In a surprising announcement this week, Canon U.S.A. took the wraps off their first online photo community, RAISE. While we are all surely familiar with the photo community concept, Canon U.S.A. has made it much more interesting by the integration of artificial intelligence.
Canon U.S.A. has approached their new RAISE social platform keeping in mind all the photographers "who are spending a tremendous amount of time arranging and searching through their library of photos." They view RAISE as a way to help "photographers streamline their workflow and continually improve their craft."
To provide relief and education to RAISE community members, they've concentrated on three areas: organization, exploring, and sharing. Organizing uploaded high-resolution JPEG images is assisted by Canon's A.I. engine which will auto-tag photos in a number of ways including category and subject, plus composition, style, emotion, and color. Through exploring the community platform, Canon believes members will gain valuable insight as to how they can improve their craft. Members will see a personalized photo feed based on the photos they themselves upload. The third benefit, sharing, involves the ability to create Collections that can be privately shared to even those outside the RAISE community, such as family or prospective clients. Users can publicly share their work within the RAISE online community.
Coming soon, Canon U.S.A. will launch an Adobe Lightroom plugin for RAISE which will bring features such as auto-tagging images to Lightroom libraries. As a Canon Digital Photo Pro 4 user, I would also like to see auto-tagging make its way in some form into their own software as well.
You can learn more and sign up on the RAISE website now.
If you are a current Canon U.S.A. account holder, you may have to hold off or create a second account because when I tried it my login was not recognized, password was reset, and then I was locked out of my account until I contact Canon's helpdesk.
i just want to say, do not try upload 126 photos at the same time :D
I don't understand why Canon would launch this when they have built something like Irista that has camera integration, raw support, editing like in Lightroom and AI already. All very well made compared to other Canon offerings like the image gateway or this. How many photo services does the company need to build, which one do I use?
Will this be open for people outside the US? :-(
Minor point: "Uses" AI, not "Utilizes" AI ;)
I had no problems using my Canon USA account. I got the same message about an existing account, but I was able to just log in with it and am using it fine. The problem is that I guess I don't quite get RAISE. I mean, I understand what it is doing but my sense is that it is pretty early and a bit crufty as a result. I've uploaded some photos, and tagged them as best I can, and reviewed the tags it suggested. While that all seems to work, I have not really found an explanation for the different categories or why one might be better than another. I also get messages on anything that I upload that "this photo needs more tags." No matter how many tags I apply. I am clearly not getting something. I will keep playing around with it, but if I'm being honest it reminds me of any number of other fledgling efforts to launch another social media platform that have not garnered much success.
I ended up just making a new account so I could use it. As for the "needs more tags" notifications, yeah I have that too. Hopefully they keep refining things. I really like the different forms of "liking" you can do to another person's image, like "Great Color," "Inspiring Story," and "Beautiful Lighting."