Can't remember who was talking about this recently but it got me curious to try it out. I think the cost of amazon prime for expedient and sometimes free shipping combined with unlimited photo storage makes it a good deal. I don't really care about the shows b/c here in Canada we only get the amazon originals which I get elsewhere anyway. So it seems to work just fine, its just super slow to load which isn't a huge deal b/c I can let it run all day/night in the background when needed. Mind you, I am loading full size raw files which are huge but when I load my iPhone pics and Sony raw files they will be smaller and will load faster. Anyone else using it? Pros...cons??? aside from the slowness of loading galleries.
I use it as a "backup of a backup"/"just in case everything else fails" type of thing. So, I don't make a lot of folders or otherwise organize my pics. I literally just upload my photos to it and I let it sort by date, which is how I organize my pics anyway. Um, it isn't slow for me? So I can't talk about that? But I try to do no more than one month of pics at a time because I try to back up to my EHDs at least once a month. Speaking of... I need to do my Amazon backup soon. Now that I have Backblaze, I don't worry so much about Amazon Photos. And I turned off face recognition and other "extras" cuz I just don't want them. But having said all that: I love how easy it is. I just drag/drop my whole "Photos To Be Backed Up" folder into Amazon Photos and it does the rest. Can't complain about that!
I don't use it, but if you backup digital kits, it some how changes .png files to .jpeg files so they lose their transparency...I didn't believe it until I did a test with some and tried to upload into the app I was doing scrapping with; I had to export them back to my laptop to get them back into .png form.
I'm not having this problem? Mine are still pngs. I've been saving some digital kits to my amazon drive this past week or two, specifically to be able to do my app scrapping. I have been liking it. I am thinking the only (digital scrappy) things I will save there are limited, but only because I don't feel like copying every single thing I own there. I do have alllllll my digital photos backed up there already. The only ones I physically have to add there are my husband's phone, which I do about monthly. Again... the importance of this was app scrapping. Most of my photos will also be saved to google photos (that's my next project), so those are my two cloud based "back ups", and then I have the two hard drives at home. Rae, I haven't noticed any slowness either.
My iPhone pics are loading super fast but my raw files are taking hours and hours. Its been over 7 hrs and only halfway done 350 raw photos....ugh.
Does anyone else find the user interface extremely cumbersome and user-unfriendly? I don't think it is structured very well. Is your Amazon Drive unlimited for all files? Ours is only unlimited for photos and I take that to mean .jpg files, right? All other files are free up to 5GB. I take it you either lose your storage or have to pay the annual fee.
Amazon says that whatever you've uploaded will count towards your "regular membership" limit of 5GB. After that, it costs money. But if you're not a Prime member, they do offer "Unlimited everything" plan (so PNG, MP3, etc) for $60/year. I haven't tried to backup PNGs, so I can't speak to that but I'll try in a minute, as long as the kids keep watching Moana. I'm also wondering if the PNGs that @klee73010 Kristina has uploaded are actually part of her "everything else" 5GB? IDK. But if so, then that's why they haven't turned into JPEGs.
I have a few folders of photos backed up there when I went to just play around with it one day. It's on my list of things to do when I have a break from work for more than a weekend
I just uploaded 3 PNGs and they stayed PNGs. I even downloaded one just to make sure. But, I don't have over 5GB of "other" files yet, so maybe that's why? Another thing: I uploaded like 350ish pics in about 10 min. Maybe less--I changed tabs and forgot to check until then lol. So the time is great, imo. @Rikki The interface isn't the best, that's true. But since this is my "backup just in case," it doesn't matter cuz I don't worry about organizing them super well or otherwise making them super accessible. I don't UL DS stuff (except that test), and since pics can be organized by date, which is how I organize my pics anyway, then it doesn't bother me too much. However, if this were my primary way of Cloud storage, then I'd probably be annoyed. The good news is, you can upload by folder, and then organize by creating folders, so if your pics are arranged the way you want at UL time, then you should be good. "Should," though, is a risky term in digital backup, isn't it?
@Tree City pngs are considered photo files and are not counted in the "everything else" category. Things like pdf print sheets or templates in psd file formats are not photo files... but jpg, png, tiff, bmp, are all photo files, according to amazon faq.
Huh. Now you've got me thinking that I should back up my digi stuff on Amazon. I wasn't going to, but maybe I should? Wait, no. It'd be too tough for me to organize everything at this point. So why did it happen to @bbymks5 ? That's weird!
It took about 24 hrs to load that test batch. the next batch I will load as jpegs and see how fast they load.
I have no idea...we don't have any photos stored in there, but when someone in one of the PL groups I'm in on FB mentioned that Amazon Prime turned her .png files into .jpeg I didn't believe her so I tried it myself...and sure as the moon rises, when I went to make a test page in the PixelLab app on my phone and imported one of the .png files, it was no longer transparent.
You are right, as a back up it is ok, but other than that, no good. I really can#t make neither head nor tail of their idea about family vault, albums, timeline and what not.
