Prisma app for iOS gets a major update that lets users edit photos without needing an internet connection. The feature is set to arrive for the Android platform in the coming week.
The app that took the world by a storm by its somewhat revolutionary photo editing skills, now has added a very important upgrade. Prisma’s latest update allows users to apply the art photo filters even without an internet connection. Which essentially means that Prisma users can now make their picture look like art in seconds, without needing to connect with the app’s servers. Users will now no longer need an internet connection to process their images and it would put an end to the constant to struggle to catch up with the app’s ‘almost always’ overloaded servers. However, it is important to note that the upgrade presently is only available for iOS users, and is expected to be rolled out on Android devices in a couple of weeks.
Also, in the initial rollout stage of the upgrade, all Prisma filters will not be available offline (currently 16 filters out of the total are available offline). But for now, it is enough to make the app self-sufficient even without the internet connection. How the offline feature for the app works is, that instead of processing all the images online on its servers, consequently being loaded with heavy traffic on its network every now and then, Prisma has implemented the neural networks right on a user’s smartphone. This would not only be an added feature where users can use the app even in places where there is no internet connection, the upgrade will also take a great deal of load off its servers, scaling up usage for millions of users.
“Now that we’ve implemented neural networks right to the smartphones, we have enough servers capacity to run full videos on them in the near future,” a Prisma spokesperson told The Verge. Like the Prisma spokesperson hints, the offline feature will also make way for Prisma to introduce its long-awaited video editing feature into the app, which is expected to be rolled out sometime this month. Last month, Alexey Moiseenkov, the co-founder of Prisma, had said that the app will soon be rolling out editing tools for videos as well. Prisma was reported to have been working on a tool, which will allow one to apply the artsy filters to short video clips. While even last month, Moiseenkov had said, that the technology was ready, the company needed time to update its computing infrastructure to support the complexities of video. The server load required to handle videos was significantly more than that required to handle static photos. However, the upgrade would easily be able to facilitate the same.
Besides the latest update, Prisma has also been constantly working to get the better out of the app for users. Earlier this month, Prisma rolled out a new update with two new editing features. The update had tools for cropping and adjusting the filter level on the photos. More importantly though, the update has made the app faster than it used to before.
Designed by a Russian company, Prisma labs Inc, the art filter app uses deep machine learning to add filters and turn boring photos into artistic pieces of work. The app for the longest time has on the top across both iOS and Android platform and has received some rave reviews from both critics and users.