Amazon Prime Photos

Introduction

After having been an Amazon Prime members for over one decade, I think I might be the last person in the world knowing that Amazon Prime members have unlimited photo storage on Amazon Photos recently.

In this blog post, I would like to share some of my experiences with Amazon Prime Photos.

Previous Photo Storage Experiences

I mainly take photos using iPhone. So previously, iCloud was my major photo storage service. I paid $0.99 per month for 50GB of storages for any kind of files, which is not bad.

I am also a Linux user. So I download photos and videos, the formats of which are often the most compatible JPEG and MP4, from iCloud using the iCloud web UI from time to time, and save them on my hard drive.

The little problem was, because I took roughly 200MB - 1GB lower resolution photos and videos in compressed JPEG and MP4 formats, 50GB is insufficient for saving all of my photos and videos. I would often have to delete photos and videos from iCloud to release some storages. Because of this, I will lose the photos and videos in the raw formats, such as HEIC. Although I don’t quite care about this for the moment, if I want to use some higher resolution photos and videos in the future, I will have no access to those files.

If I don’t want to delete any file from iCloud, probably paying $10 per month for a 2TB storage plan is most suitable for me.

Getting photos and videos embeded on my own website from iCloud is inconvenient, because they don’t directly provide stable URLs to the JPEG and MP4 files. I would have to find the URL from download histories and the URL might not just be accessible in the future.

Amazon Prime Photo Experiences

I paid $14.99 per month for Amazon Prime and I had only been using its shopping benefits. It turns out that Amazon Prime members have unlimited photo storage on Amazon Photos. The supported photo formats include, but not limited to, JPEG and HEIC. This means I can save however many photos I took on iPhone to Amazon Photos. The Amazon Photos web UI is not bad and I did not feel it’s too difficult to learn how to upload photos in large batches and arrange albums there.

The video storage is not unlimited for Amazon Prime members. It’s only 5GB for free. However, because it’s easy to filter files based on file types, we can easily find all the videos and delete the videos that we don’t want to save if it’s necessary. For additional storage, it’s $1.99 per month for 100GB minimum.

More importantly, Amazon Photos have iOS Apps that allows us to auto-upload all the photos. This makes our lives much better for managing the photos across difference services.

The experiences of getting photos and videos embeded on my own website from Amazon Photos are similar to the one from iCloud. The URLs obtained from the same trick get expired very quickly. This means we can’t just share the photos and videos from Amazon Photos on our own websites.

Conclusions

Overall, Amazon Prime Photos is a nice to have “free” and “unlimited” service if we are already paying for Amazon Prime memberships.