I have 3 Meural canvas II's and have added images to all 3. Do the images actually get stored in the device or just on the cloud? In other words, if I turn off the wifi in my home, will the canvas still display the images? I am thinking the canvas constantly pulls images from the cloud to display. Also, I noticed there is an sd slot in the device. How would I push images to the sd card? I have uploaded images to your cloud and edited image data. If I exceed the 4 gig storage limit on your cloud, I'm thinking I can get past that limitation by using sd cards in each device. Is there a limit to the size of the sd card (in gigs) that the canvas device can support.

Something for everybody to consider regarding storage. The Meural displays a max resolution of ~2MP (1920x1080). Cameras and images downloaded from the web regularly exceed this resolution; if you store/save that image with a significantly higher resolution, the Meural will indeed downsize it for the display. But it also means you are using a larger portion of your Meural space to hold that image than necessary, since the Meural is dropping pixels anyway. So resizing images to a lower resolution will save you space (both in Meural cloud storage or on an SD card). Also the format you choose can make a difference. JPEG/JPG is a compressed format that will use much less space than PNG. a 1920x1080 image should be ~425k as a JPEG, ~1.2MB as a PNG. If you spend some time downsizing images you can save space. Experiment with downsizing to see the resulting image quality; you may find that Meural's software does a better job of downsizing to 1920x1080 if you give it a 3840x2160 (~8MB uncompressed) image than if you downsize all the way to 1920x1080 yourself. But I don't expect you'll lose a lot of quality if you make the effort to take an image that's currently 16000x9000 (~144MB) and reduce it to 3840x2160 before sending it to the Meural. Just some thoughts.

I created a folder on my desktop and the drag the image files into the folder. When I have all the images in the folder, I insert an SD card into my laptop. I navigate to the SD card and create a folder called meural1 (required by the canvas operating system). Then I copy the contents of the folder I created on my desktop into the meural1 folder on the SD card. Once the files have been copied, I remove the SD card from the laptop, I power down the canvas, I insert the SD card into the canvas, I wait 20 seconds, and then I turn the canvas back on. I did have to contact netgear first and I had them remove all the images from my cloud account. If there are images in the cloud account, the canvas will pull from the cloud instead of from the SD card. It took me a bunch of calls to support to finally get everything working but once it does, its pretty nice.

I am more or less in the same situation. I bought the canvasII for my wife's bthday, for exactly that use case, storing our pictures locally in a SD card as we don't want to upload our personal pictures in Netgear's cloud. Now I cannot make the SD card work. I have done all I have read in these posts, but the canvas would not recognize the SD card. Netgear support does not even answer my e-mails.But based on your post, even if I make it work, I cannot manage the SD from the app???!!! This is insane!!Clearly, this product has an extremely good quality of image, but the usability with local storage sucks, and the Netgear customer support team is non-existing.I regret having bought it...

There is a slot next to the power on button on the bottom that you can load a SD card slot with additional photos. There are comments regarding this from other owners with suggestions if you do a search. You can load a large amount of your personal photos this way, but it has certain limitations. For the money, I think 4 GB of photos is laughable. I am hoping Netgear increases this storage. I have mentioned to Netgear that if I max out on their storage, I cannot buy any more of their photos. I filled my 4 GB in just about a month after buying the canvas, mostly with my personal photos. But I have hundreds more to add to various playlists. I hope this helps you.

Correct. I finally got the sd card working but the app won't control it. Even if you set the schedule to go off at night and back on in the morning, it won't turn onto the sd card so what a waste. As I got a free year of cloud storage I put everything there for now. After the year, I am back to the same problem. Screen quality GREAT Memrory, Software and App - Sucks Tech Support - leads a lot to desire Good luck

Meural Canvas II storage | NETGEAR Communities

32 Replies

Pacific
Star
Jan 27, 2020
I was hoping someone would respond to you as I have run out of space in the cloud storage and I am not even close to downloading the number of photos I want on the canvas. I have a call into customer service to see if I can buy more cloud space.
- jonathn62
  Guide
  Jan 27, 2020
  I gave up on support. I just got SD cards from Best Buy and configured the canvas to pull from the SD cards instead of the cloud.
  - Pacific
    Star
    Jan 27, 2020
    How much extra storage does that give you?
- Markymark100
  Tutor
  May 13, 2020
  Can't load pics as I'm out of cloud storage space - how do I increase this?
  Why is Meural customer service so dreadful!
- Markymark100
  Tutor
  May 13, 2020
  What did you end up doing? I'm also out of storage
  - Pacific
    Star
    May 13, 2020
    There is a slot next to the power on button on the bottom that you can load a SD card slot with additional photos. There are comments regarding this from other owners with suggestions if you do a search. You can load a large amount of your personal photos this way, but it has certain limitations.
    
    For the money, I think 4 GB of photos is laughable. I am hoping Netgear increases this storage.
    
    I have mentioned to Netgear that if I max out on their storage, I cannot buy any more of their photos. I filled my 4 GB in just about a month after buying the canvas, mostly with my personal photos. But I have hundreds more to add to various playlists.
    
    I hope this helps you.
aj222
Initiate
Jun 22, 2021
The trick I found to work was to remove ALL images from the cloud. I had uploaded a few images to the cloud, but when I saw the terrible interface to interact with it, I decided to go the SD route. And then, I started having a lot of the issues that you guys mention.

I ended up removing all the images that I had previously uploaded to the cloud and now the frame is happily displaying only the images in the SD card.

I still have issues with pictures not displaying properly - because their aspect ratio doesn't sit well with the frame. However, I recently bought a Nest Hub Max, and even though the display is much smaller and the quality not even close - at least the software works beautifully and it can display all types of images, landscape, portrait, from old cameras, from new phones. So, IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO IT. Netgear should get a dedicated team to fix this once and for all. It's 2021!
- mickyjoem
  Tutor
  Jun 23, 2021
  Great reply and very helpful. Thanks for the time to reply. This is what I looked for. Hopefully Netgear will listen to its frustrated customers and do something for the money they have spent in the area of support and App improvements
  
  Mike
mattwillhill
Guide
Aug 22, 2021
I found the cloud server clumsy in both upload & download and gave poor control. For me the SD card is the only way to go. The SD card has no storage limit and plays pictures in numerical file order.
To get a numerical file ‘play’ you need to use a number sequence of the same order so if you have 99 images you need to start & label image no.1 as “100” up to “199” (3 digits) if you have 9,999 images you need to use the sequence starting at “1,000” up to “9,999” (4 digits) and so on …..
- aspier
  Star
  Aug 23, 2021
  Thanks but in order to add pictures you have to take the meural off the wall, take out the card, put in your pc, load the pictures, etc.
  
  Also you can't use the sleep function to go back on to the card.
  
  So poorly designed.
  - Bobbolew
    Aspirant
    Jan 26, 2022
    Don’t need to remove frame from the wall. Power down the frame then unplug it from power, (this seems to make it recognize the new contents on the SD card better). Anyway, just open the SD card slot and remove the card. When ready re-install card, plug the Canvas back into the outlet and power it up. Again, no need to remove from the wall.

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Meural Canvas II storage