Chrome is one of the first things I disable on my Android devices, and I hate the idea of signing up for any accounts just to access local files.
But Canon welcomed me with a big surprise, and a fuck you, too!
I figured out how to connect my Nikon to their app (finally) - works somehow, most of the time, but you can only transfer photos compressed to 2MB jpeg. Is there a reason for that? I think it’s annoying to have to delete the duplicates later on
but you can only transfer photos compressed to 2MB jpeg.
I don’t own a Nikon camera, but my Sony, Canon, and Panasonic camera apps allow you to set the size of the transferred photo to “original”, and they do default to something smaller, so I always change it first.
Do you have that option?
Couldn’t find it anywhere, neither on the camera nor in the app :( but thank you anyway!
Canon is on my personal blacklist for decades. I bought a printer from them, not just a normal A4/legal, but a professional, wide one that uses rolls of paper, etc. I was unhappy with the state of the driver under Linux, so I called and asked for a programming documentation to write my own printer driver. Their opinion on Linux/open source was that “open source is theft of intellectual property”.
I wonder how many open source libraries their driver codebase relies on, it had best be zero with that attitude.
They had no Linux driver back then at all, but there were some rudimentary from the community that printed Ok. They just did not support special printing modes, which i wanted to add.
Their opinion is stupid, but I’m also not sure what you expected when you asked some random sales rep for deep technical info.
I contacted both technical support for commercial systems and later their booth on a big technical trade fair (CeBit Hannover), and got basically the same opinion both times. The first was definitely no “Sales Rep”, and the people at the booth were a manager and an engineer.
But I agree, their opinion is stupid.
Well, in a commercial space, at least if you’re big enough, asking sales reps for deep tech info is the norm. They are supposed to find an engineer and get them to answer.
If you’re a big enough customer, you set the norms.
I’ll never buy products\brands that do this kind of shit. Never.
I worry a day will come that it’s all of them.
The problem is, you don’t always know they will do this until after you pay your money for them.
Especially if its a few years down the line when you’re already a few grand in to their system
True. But doing your homework prior to a purchase is more important than ever.
Of course, it always is.
But a lot of this type of enshittification can be difficult to learn about without getting your hands on thw product first. Especially if it’s a new model.
Dude. I needed to use this app the other day for the remote shutter function, and I was somewhere with no signal and no internet. Only to discover that the app had updated and now required me to create an account to use it. I was pissed.
Same thing!! It sure steamed my broccoli.
mmmm steamed broccoli. drools
Yup, sucks. What I do is just take out the card a plug it into a little USB dongle thing which I can plug into either my phone or laptop.
Also faster than the app too. The app uses WiFi or Bluetooth. Its also annoyingly finicky to connect tk the camera.
What I do is just take out the card a plug it into a little USB dongle thing which I can plug into either my phone or laptop.
What’s wild to me is that anyone would do it any other way. I’m astounded that this is somehow a “tip”.
Not even 10 years ago it was simply the way to do it.
Depends on your workflow.
As an example, if I’m in a studio and have a camera set up a certain way, it’s highly inconvenient to have to turn it off, pull the card out (which can mean removing it from the tripod if the card slot is on the bottom of the camera), plug it into a phone or laptop, copy the image, load the image for review, eject the card, reinsert the card, set the camera up again…
I mean, holy shit.
Why do that when you can tap the gallery through the app (already connected because you’ve got live view going), click on the photo, open it for review, keep shooting.
Of course, if you’ve shot a big day and have to offload 100gb of photos and video, an external card reader is the only way to go.
But for studio, live sessions, or quick shots, app transfer is so much easier. Some cameras have NFC, so you just tap your phone and start the transfer.
None of this has ever been a problem. It’s the requirement to have a connected account that makes it a problem.
I think it’s a bit hilarious that touching the camera is considered such a hassle now. When I learned photography we had to finish the reel and spend a day in a darkroom before we could see the final product.
Still, I hope someone makes some open source software for you. More convenience is always better.
I think it’s a bit hilarious that touching the camera is considered such a hassle now.
If you are being paid for your work, or you are under time constraints, there’s no way anyone would choose to take dozens of steps over a few.
I still love my older cameras, including one of the first DSLRs (Canon Digital Rebel). No apps. Every feature sold to you is right there in the camera, and those feature still work 20 years later.
It’s the enshittification of technology that’s the real problem. Most people would love the conveniences offered by advanced features, but not when there’s a catch.
And this extends to well beyond “regular cameras”. GoPro has completely ruined their hardware by locking basic features (like image stabilization) behind their app and/or subscription!
When I learned photography we had to finish the reel and spend a day in a darkroom before we could see the final product.
That’s when photography existed as a skilled art, and a more enjoyable hobby. I miss those times.
Advantage of using the app: Remote shutter/control.
Very convenient if you take lunar photos.Yeah but the app also does remote control / viewing. The transfer is a bonus of being able to quickly do the transfer and text it to someone right away.
Of course, none of this matters because I don’t have Chrome on my new phone and can’t even create the stupid account if I wanted to.
Also, can’t find information about which version they rolled that out in and get an older version.
You want version 3.2.40.36, which is the last one before the app requirement. It’s available on APKMirror and probably elsewhere as well.
Cables are better but they have a minimum time to setup and can be inconvenient if you do it while traveling. If you just need a quick transfer then using an app or wireless transfer is better.
If you’ve never actually used the Canon app on your phone: I assure you that it would be faster to ride the elevator down from your hotel room, walk to the nearest store, haggle with the store owner for 10 minutes over the price of the cable, get your money changed, buy it, and return to your hotel room than it would be to wait for the app to connect to your camera over wi-fi.
Apparently not anymore.
magiclantern.
Jailbreak your shit. You own it don’t you?
Magic Lantern is awesome!
Unfortunately, it’s for higher-end cameras, not my old point-and-shoot cameras. And it doesn’t magically give your device GPS for geotagging images :(
The app was fine. The enshittification of the app is not.
Can you not just find and use an old version and disable updates for it?
Yes, another user already confirmed that the old version still works. I’ve done the same with the old GoPro app.
EDIT: but old versions have built-in planned obsolescence, because they won’t support newer devices (both cameras or smartphones) for very long. My Samsung 360 camera was rendered useless once they discontinued app support.
I have an old Gear VR and a Samsung S3. I don’t believe there is any way to use it today. It wants to connect to Facebook to log in, but their auth token has expired.
It wants to connect to Facebook to log in
What a fucking cancer of integration.
You actually can still use it, there’s some folks on reddit trying their best to keep it going. App support is very poor though.
My S3 is garbage. I only wanted to try and stream videos to it (without motion tracking) but even that seems too hard.
Jailbreaking locks you out of banking apps.
Edit: jailbreaking your phone might lock you out of banking apps.
Jailbreaking your camera does NOT.
I don’t think people are out here doing their banking on their Canon DSLRs
Don’t you gotta jailbreak your phone as well? Otherwise it will require the chrome browser
No, installing magiclantern on a jailbroken camera means you don’t need to do the Canon sign in bullshit at all.
Great! I’ll update my post! Thanks for clearing it up.
Maybe on Apple (?), bur GrapheneOS supports my banking apps just fine. The only thing missing is Google Pay, which I don’t use anyways
How? Having an unlocked bootloader or root breaks Safety Net, which disables many apps. You need an unlocked bootloader to install custom ROMs.
Magisck used to be a workaround, but Google has been sabotaging it at the OS and hardware layers, so it wasn’t working the last time I tried a few years ago.
Pixels can have custom AVB keys so the bootloader can be locked after installing gOS.
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This is a useless comment.
Says the person who randomly brought up phones when the other person was talking about a camera jailbreak.
And isn’t that just exactly what they count on?
Firefox doesn’t support WebUSB, Web Bluetooth and several other integrations, so applications that need to connect to other devices need some kind of Chrome application. Massive dick move by forcing account creation tho.
Firefox doesn’t support WebUSB, Web Bluetooth and several other integrations, so applications that need to connect to other devices need some kind of Chrome application.
If those features in the browser were needed, I could be a little less infuriated (they didn’t have to break previously working features, though).
However, Chrome was needed only to sign up and log in. Once that was done, I was able to disable chrome, and the app continued to work after restarting it.
Why they couldn’t implement a log in directly in the app, or use the device webview api, is beyond me.
I’m just waiting for that WebAntivirus support to land in chrome, for all those websites that tell you to install an antivirus.
bye bye Canon. You were once the light of my photographic life - now you’re dead to me for pulling this bullshit.
on my camera i can plug it directly into my phone and transfer it with a usbc cable
You’ll end up with better quality images this way compared to transferring them to Canon servers where they’ll likely be compressed or altered.
Not to mention likely cataloged by geotag and used for “targeted marketing” by Canon and “select partners”.
That shit is just creepy.
Probably used to train an AI model as well
This is actually the real reason behind the change
it prob does this already on the camera wish someone figured out how to make open source camera os
I remember having a PowerShot SX110IS back in 2010 and there was an open source firmware I loaded on it. I forget what it was called. It’s a damn shame that we can’t really do stuff like that anymore.
It might have been CDHK, which is also what I run on my old SX130IS.
Magic Lantern probably. Don’t know about compact cameras, but this thing was big with DSLRs 10-15 years ago. What’s pretty impressive to me is that it didn’t require flashing the firmware, it just booted from a memory card.
They’re not being transmitted to canon before downloading. The camera starts a (slow) local WiFi network that the phone can connect to and it directly transfers that way. This means you still get full quality RAW files
In order to access my tax and benefit accounts on the Government of Canada website I can only use Chrome … making sure to wipe all cookies, etc afterwards.
I freaking hate shite like this.
Is that through the CRA website? I’ve been able to access it on Firefox (through Linux) without being hassled.
But yeah, websites that force you to use Chrome would get on my nerves. I’d be sandboxing that entire browsing session, too. LOL
I use FF on both Mac and PC for the CRA site. Can’t remember the last time I used a browser other than FF for anything.
I’ve had some sites simply not work right with Firefox, so I’ll use an alternative, usually just another flavour of Firefox, like Librewolf or Waterfox, and they tend to work just fine. It’s probably something to do with some of the locked down settings that I use on my primary browser, but it’s nothing compared to forced Google Chrome or gasp Internet Explorer. 😵
the CRA website? I’ve been able to access it on Firefox (through Linux) without being hassled.
Same here.
Maybe they’ve got some privacy plug-ins that are preventing the CRA website from functioning properly?
In the past, I have had to add my bank and some government websites to my whitelist
I stopped using FF a while back. But if memory serves I wasn’t able to access gov’t sites with it either.
I’m pretty sure that duckduckgo browser is based on Chromium. That should work in Chrome’s stead.
Nope. I use multiple browsers (DDG, Ghostery, Waterfox, etc) and none of them work.
Have you tried changing the user agent to chrome?
Nope. I will try that and see if it works tho.
Thanks for the head’s up.
Update … it took a while but that does work on Ghostery. Thanks again. :)
Awesome!
Chrome or chormium?
Chrome.
I don’t have much experience with cameras but isn’t it usually sd cards that you can pull out and transfer using a sd reader? Does the camera have internal storage that needs an account and app?
For data transfer only, yes, you can eject the SD card and copy your files.
But the app is used for other features, too. So you’re inconvenienced no matter what feature you use.
Yeah I guessed that much but your original post was a bit confusing as it doesn’t mention the app. Hence the question.
I rolled back the app to an older version before this was required and blocked it from network or updating. The only feature I use is the gps data over bluetooth and remote shutter. Canon can go F*** themselves with this nonsense
Is there something about Chrome specifically that’s no bueno nowadays? I haven’t heard anything but to be fair I don’t really keep myself in that loop too much now
There’s a general negative attitude towards chromium browsers due to some anticompetitive practices pulled by Google in addition to privacy concerns and probably some more issues I’m not aware of. So that includes chrome, but also edge and most other chromium based browsers.
Ah okay, I hadn’t heard about any of that, very good to know, thank you
I don’t want any of my business being shared with Google, including the fact that I use Canon products. It’s just yet another data point for them to weaponize via targeted ads and data brokering.
And simply opening Chrome means that a data siphon to Google was just opened, so telemetry data would have been collected immediately.
Oh that’s too bad. Guess I’m not buying that shit.
I’ve been running across sites that demand I use Chrome on PC too, a non-starter since Google “upgraded” Chrome to prevent adblock use. My solution has been to install User Agent Switcher for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/uaswitcher/. Works on both PC and phone.
The Canon app calls on the Chrome app to be there. It’s more than just the user agent, unfortunately.
So Chrome is sharing way more than the user agent with Canon? That’s just ridiculous. I hope someone with the time will take a good look about what information is being sent.
All I can say is that it would NOT work unless I also turned off my system wide adblocker (AdGuard).
For sure they are doing some shady shit.
A starter for Firefox called “Chrome”?
