Sony Updates Visual Story App for iOS With Live Gallery

Mar 31, 2021

With the increased demand for remote participation of weddings and events, Sony has updated their Visual Story iOS app to offer Sony camera shooters a Live Gallery viewing experience for guests.

Since the release of Visual Story in December 2020, wedding and event photographers have been able to connect compatible Sony cameras to the app and automatically transfer photos to their iPhones, iPads, or Sony’s cloud service. Further, the transferred photos are then automatically sorted and filtered with the power of AI, allowing the photographer to keep focus on shooting and still have a curated batch of images at the ready once finished for instant delivery.

Now, with Live Gallery being added to the latest version of Visual Story, “instant delivery” takes on new meaning. With the same level of automated curation and specified filters, photo galleries can be updated and viewed in real time by the client’s guests as the event is still happening and the photographer is still at work taking photos. Guests to the Live Gallery can also “like” photos, information that may later be used by the event photographer to make choices on which final images to deliver to the client.

Live Gallery inside the Visual Story app.

Sony has added more selection options for photographers inside the app in order to more quickly find specific images through the use of a new object detection filter. Examples for a wedding photographer would be searching for images that show cake, food, tableware, or jewelry.

New object detection filters in the Visual Story app.

The Visual Story app has a free tier for testing the waters, however there are limits in place including number of projects, galleries, images, and cloud storage space. Two paid tiers are available to increase these limits. The Basic plan runs $20 per month while the Power plan will cost $50 per month. A breakdown of each plan’s offering can be viewed on the Sony website.

Visual Story v1.1 with Live Gallery functionality is now available on the Apple App Store. Photographers will need to have a compatible Sony camera to connect with the app, which includes the a1, FX3, a7C, a7R IV, a7S III, a9, a9 II, and a7 III running the latest firmware.

Sony claims app development for additional platforms is “under discussion.”