Lytro Shuts Down Its Light Field Photo Sharing Website

Dec 06, 2017

It started full of hope and possibilities: In 2011, Lytro promised a camera that could change photography forever with its light-field technology, which allowed photographers to refocus after the shot. But having already announced a change in the company’s direction towards video rather than consumer still cameras, Lytro has now shut down its online sharing platform for light-field still images. pictures.lytro.com is no more.

The platform was used by Lytro camera owners to share interactive images where the focus could be selected simply by clicking on any part of the scene. With the closure of the service, it’s now impossible for owners of Lytro cameras to share such interactive images online — the Lytro desktop application is now the only remaining way to refocus shots.

Other ways you can still experience the images are by printing them as 3D lenticular prints or through a VR headset. If you want to share such an image online, the only thing you can now do is export a standard video, JPEG, or GIF file.

“More than two years ago, Lytro began focusing on Light Field video solutions for the cinema and virtual reality industries and discontinued the manufacturing and distribution of Lytro cameras for photography,” writes Lytro. “As a part of our plan to further focus on these new efforts, the ability to publish from Lytro Desktop and Lytro Mobile to pictures.lytro.com will be discontinued.”

Any Lytro photos embedded on websites will no longer work, and there’s no way of circumventing that. The company says all the stored images are gone for good. In fact, you can now see the missing embedded file on a previous post PetaPixel wrote about the Lytro web viewer.