Amazon has announced another feature for Prime subscribers: unlimited free online photo storage. As part of their Cloud Drive, Prime Photos will allow you to back up all your photos in full resolution via either web browser, smartphone app, or desktop PC software. The iOS and Android apps can be set to automatically upload your “camera roll” photos.
Prime Photos requires an Amazon Prime, Amazon Mom, Amazon Student or Amazon Fresh membership (trials count).
Back in May 2014, Flickr announced 1,000 GB of free online photo storage also at full resolution. Their smartphone app can also auto-upload pictures from your phone. For Google+ Photos, any photos over 2048×2048 pixels will count toward your storage limit (15 GB free; 1 TB is $9.99 per month).
On the one hand, Prime Photos provides even more value to Prime subscribers and it is good to have a service you pay some money towards. Flickr is free, but that also means they might shut down in the future if they lack revenue for ongoing support. On the other hand, if you stop your $99 a year Prime membership you’ll either lose your photos or have to pay for Cloud Drive storage. It’s not very cheap: 1 TB of storage costs $500 year.
Does anyone know if you can have multiple phones under one Prime membership? For example can my wife and I both use one Prime membership to back up our photos and videos to the Amazon cloud?
I’m pretty sure as long as you use the same login, you are fine. Lots of people have multiple devices (Amazon Kindle Fire, iPads) so I can’t imagine it being restricted to one device.
I just have an issue with all the headlines saying “Amazon is giving free unlimited photo backup” when it requires Amazon Prime membership.
I think the proper phrase should be “Amazon Prime now includes unlimited photo backup”
Long time subscriber, first time poster… love your blog.
Another new perk I learned about Amazon Prime: I just bought Adobe Photoshop Elements 13 for $50 off retail ($49, usually $99). The deal only shows up once you put it in your cart. Makes me wonder what other software deals are out there on Prime.
On the probability scale, isn’t it more probable that one is inclined to cancel his/her Prime membership in th e future (the fee will always increase in the future) than the probability of Flickr charging for photo space? Even if Flickr does charge for space, the current members will more than likely be grandfathered in for free. I’m just saying that once you start uploading gigs of photos into Amazon, you are pretty much locked for life with them. I think that’s the whole point of why they are offering this service in the first place. Who is going to want to go through the hassle of moving all the photos off Amazon ? Joe Blow will say “nah, it’s too much of a hassle…I’ll just keep paying $99 a year”…which we all know will just keep increasing in price.
$99+ for the next 5-10 years vs free flickr storage ….granted, Prime has other features that make the $99 worthwhile , but I was looking at the stuff I’ve ordered over the past years and don’t think I’ve paid more than $99 in shipping fees had I not had Prime. Prime seems to also make me more inclined to order things , but if things cost money to ship, I wouldn’t be ordering certain things. The video service I find lacking, so I have Netflix for that. kindle book owner lending library is nice, but can never get the books I really want to borrow.
I forgot to mention in the previous post that there’s always incentives for NOT having Prime: If you delay your shipping (anything other than 2 day free shipping), Amazon usually throws in $1 credits and other promo items that you can use for your next order. So, essentially, you’re making money for not having Prime, lol.
Don’t you only get the $1 off credit if you already have Prime and just choose to decline the 2-day shipping for ground?
You might also consider an Office 365 Personal (single user) or Home (5 users) subscription. The Home version is $100 / year and gets each user 1 TB storage in their “OneDrive” (rumor is that this will be upped to UNLIMITED within the next few months). Bonus is that you also get full copies of Office client applications (Word, Excel, etc) to install on up to 5 PCs.