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Re: Meural Canvas II storage

jonathn62
Guide

Meural Canvas II storage

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.

Message 1 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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. 

Model: MC327| Meural Canvas II
Message 2 of 33
jonathn62
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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.
Message 3 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

How much extra storage does that give you?

Message 4 of 33
jonathn62
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Depends on the size off the SD cards. I used 64 gb cards. So far I have 400 pictures on one, 250 on one, and 200 on a third.
Message 5 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

I have run out of space and still plan to have our wedding and several vacations on the canvas. I would hope they would up the amount of cloud storage or allow us to buy more. I filled up my 20 gb in 6 weeks and I am just getting started.

 

So you have three cards. Is it easy to switch to the SD cards from the app or laptop?

 

Message 6 of 33
jonathn62
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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.

 

Message 7 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Thank you for your explaination. It was most helpful.

 

I think for the money we pay for the membership and additional purchased artwork, the cloud should have unimited storage. Not everyone will use a lot of gb. I will. I have blown through the 20 gb provided in six short weeks. I spent many hours putting playlists together of the membership provided artwork, what I purchased, and our own photos before running out of space. Frankly I am unwilling to give up that work.

 

Alternatively they should have the SD card included in their software program to allow you to toggle between the two sources. 

 

If Amazon can provide unlimited cloud photo storage to their members, Netgear should be able to their membors. They cannot continue to make money selling artwork if you have run out of storage.

 

I have let Crutchfield know my thoughts and have also contacted Netgear several times. I am still pushing them to make a change.

 

Thanks for your help.  Joanne

Message 8 of 33
alaterry
Initiate

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Are you getting the impression that the GB limitation in the cloud, the interface to upload and delete from the cloud, and the difficulty in using SD cards is done intentionally so a user will instead just pay for the membership??

Model: MC227| Meural Canvas
Message 9 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

I am hoping it is growing pains. I like so many things about the canvas.

 

Todays problem is that I have apparently maxed out on my allowed number of playlists ! 

I have the membership, and If I try to download one of the artwork groups from the Meural's home page I get an error message and cannot download it.

 

After multiple replies back and forth from customer support, I "think" I understand that my "Your Canvas is out of space" error message, is due to my having too many Playlists! I had no idea there was a limit !?!

 

I really did not want to add various family vacations, weddings, and artwork together in a combo slide show. I wanted individual playlists. So I have to rethink how to set up the canvas. I have several large playlists that tell a story from photo one to the end of the photos. 

 

I have lots of room left on the cloud, but no room left on the canvas.

 

Personally, I think the canvas cloud space should be unlimited with how expensive the Canvas is.

 

 

Message 10 of 33
Markymark100
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas storage

Can't load pics as I'm out of cloud storage space - how do I increase this?

Why is Meural customer service so dreadful!

Message 11 of 33
Markymark100
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

What did you end up doing? I'm also out of storage

Message 12 of 33
Markymark100
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Meural support is absolutely awful!

Message 13 of 33
Pacific
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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.

 

 

Message 14 of 33
aspier
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Kids bought this for me for my birtday.  Frustrated with the internal storage and bought a micro SD card.  Loaded over a thousand pictures but you can't control the card from the app.  That is crazy.  Makes it so difficult to manage.  

 

Can't figure out how to add the meural museum art to my playlist. 

 

For such an expensive frame you would think they would make this consumer friendly.

 

Any help or guidance appreciated

Model: MC227| Meural Canvas
Message 15 of 33
Melliott716
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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.

Model: MC227| Meural Canvas
Message 16 of 33
XaveSun
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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...

 

Message 17 of 33
aspier
Star

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

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 

Model: MC227| Meural Canvas
Message 18 of 33
XaveSun
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

I finally managed to SPEAK with Meural's support (I was still waiting for a response to my e-mail after one week). The guy did great and now I can use the SD card. It was a firmware issue.

But this does not solves the issue that accessing the pictures in the SD drive is very clunky and tedious. Really, Meural/Netgear needs to do something with that. The SD drive should be accessible from the app. I don't see myself waving a thousand times in front of the Canvas to find the picture I want (!!)... well, seeing it from the positive side, it will be a good workout 🙂

Message 19 of 33
probuilder1
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Absolutely. I was an early adopter and was grandfathered in to the membership once Netgear purchased Meural. Up until then I had never exhauseted my cloud storage.

Message 20 of 33
probuilder1
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

As I said, I too was grandfathered in and am out of storage. Has anyone figured out how to download the library from Netgear cloud to a local SD card to bypass the 4Gb limit?

 

They took away the vast amount of storgae I had before they were sold. I think that's unfair.

 

Message 21 of 33
vcordero07
Aspirant

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

What steps did the rep tell you to do? I'm also out of storage. Thank you


@XaveSun wrote:

I finally managed to SPEAK with Meural's support (I was still waiting for a response to my e-mail after one week). The guy did great and now I can use the SD card. It was a firmware issue.

But this does not solves the issue that accessing the pictures in the SD drive is very clunky and tedious. Really, Meural/Netgear needs to do something with that. The SD drive should be accessible from the app. I don't see myself waving a thousand times in front of the Canvas to find the picture I want (!!)... well, seeing it from the positive side, it will be a good workout 🙂


 

Message 22 of 33
XaveSun
Guide

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

I don't recall all the steps right now, but it was a kind of "hard reset" (you needed to disconnect the mains cable from the back of the frame, then insert the SD card, then boot up the frame again, etc, in order for the frame to recognize the SD card). But again, I don't remember all the steps. I think the frame even downloaded the latest firmware version. You'd better call Support and talk to an agent.

Since I did it in July last year, it works fine with the playlists I have defined in my SD card, with my own pictures. But still, the local pictures in the SD card cannot be managed from the app, which makes it not very user friendly.

This product is "born in the cloud" and its purpose is to make you subscribe to the art gallery services they have and make you buy cloud storage, so the SD card option is just a " workaround" and it is deffinitely out of Netgear's interest.

 

Message 23 of 33
aj222
Initiate

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

I just bought a Canvas II so I'm not grandathered with anything. I agree with everybody here that the actual device is awesome. The quality/size is just very very good. The price is quite high for the terrible software/networking support. 

 

Using SD cards to manage pictures is just insane in this day and age. My 10-year-old digital frame has an SD card.

 

On top of the storage issue, in case somebody from Netgear is actually reading this, have you ever tried uploading 1000 images from your phone to the cloud? It takes for ever and not only that, when the phone gets locked up, the app will no longer upload.  So, even if they increase the cloud storage they need to make a much better system to upload images/videos.

 

You can use your phone app OK for 10-100 images but more than 100 and forget it, it will just be too slow and kill your phone. Even if they re-write that part won't be pretty and will use too much of your phone resources. I'd love to be able to easily upload a large (more than a thousand) pictures from just pointing to a hard drive or something like that.

Message 24 of 33
mickyjoem
Tutor

Re: Meural Canvas II storage

Hello all,

 

I have just received and set up Canvas II and only now am reading somewhat alarmingly the issues relating to not being able to control displaying images on an SD card to the canvas.  Has anyone actually been able to get the Canvas to display just SD card stored images?

 

It is scarey to think that after spending nearly a thousand euros for the 27inch version that one is being forced to purchase images from the galleries.  I do a lot of photography and image editing, with some Astrophotography, so I am quite happy to observe my own images.  Occasional Masterpieces (apart from my own!) are of course always nice but dont want my arm twisted to avail of that all the time.

 

Would appreciate any help at all 🙂

 

Mike

Model: MC327| Meural Canvas II
Message 25 of 33
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