Canon has taken the next step with Project1709. It has launched a new online storage and management service for photos called Irista, and it directly rivals Picasa, Flickr, Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and all those other cloud services.

There's just one catch: Irista is only for photos. It's not for documents or any of the other stuff you may want to cloud-save. It's meant to change the way you store and share images, and that's it. Irista supports a wide range of file types, doesn't have size limitations, and offers auto-uploading and a brawny search index. You can tag and filter photos, for instance, by dates, location, custom user tags, lens type, etc.

Canon also lets you share to Facebook and Flickr as well as track any social comments via Irista's tiled interface. Naturally, as this is a Canon service, Irista also lists each image's EXIF data, including the camera’s model, exposure time, aperture and ISO speed. That means you'll easily be able to refer back to your favourite photos in Irista in order to set up similar shots.

READ: Canon launches own cloud image service, Project 1709

Although Irista, which was previously known as Project1709 during development, doesn't have any editing options or even snazzy Instagram-like filters, it is ideal for dedicated and professional photographers. It is paired down and certainly sleek. The pricing options aren't too bad either. You get 10GB of free storage to start, with access to all the bells and whistles.

Canon's Irista service is now live. If you'd like to get going straight away with a little more storage space, people living in the UK and select European countries can pay £4.49/€4.99 for 50GB a month or £45.00/€49.00 a year. They can also pay £9.99/€10.99 for 100 GB a month or £99/€109 a year.