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Amazon has been very busy lately, figuring out new ways to make Prime members happier. As if Prime Reading, introduced earlier this month, weren’t enough, now Amazon is launching Family Vault for storing and sharing photos.
If you’ve ever gone on a group vacation and wanted to share photos, you know exchanging photos can get confusing.
Did everyone get all the photos they wanted? How to share the video of Grandpa cliff diving at Cabo?
What Family Vault Does
Family Vault is a new feature of Amazon Prime Photos, which gives unlimited storage of photos at full resolution for members of Amazon Prime.
[tip] Learn more about Prime Photo benefits at Free Unlimited Photo Storage for Amazon Prime Members! [/tip]
Family Vault lets up to six people use Amazon Prime Photos on a single Prime account to store and share unlimited photos. The group also has up to 5 GB of storage space for videos in Prime Photos.
Each group in Prime Photos has a Family Vault where photos can be shared privately among members of the group.
Prime members love the benefit of unlimited photo storage but often struggle to collect and organize photos across multiple devices and accounts into a single, shareable archive,” said David Nenke, Director of Prime Photos, Amazon. “We launched the Family Vault to make it easy for family members to safely store and share all their favorite moments.’“
Photos are stored privately in Prime Photos. Each member of the group then chooses which photos to add to the Family Vault, where they can be viewed and shared by others in the group.
Add photos from your computer or directly from your mobile devices using the Prime Photos app. You can view Family Vault photos from any device using the website or the Prime Photos app.
Smart Search
But Prime Photos isn’t just for storing and sharing. You can easily search your photos with Amazon’s new Smart Search technology.
Search by keywords, such as sunset, beach, mountains, or by location and date. The photos are also organized so you can see photos of the members of your Family Vault easily.
You don’t need to tag the photos, Amazon’s Smart Search will identify the subjects of the photo and organize them automatically.
Learn more about Smart Search and watch a helpful video at the Amazon Prime Photos Smart Search page.
Printing
In case you’d like to look at an actual photo, instead of one on a screen, Amazon is now offering photo printing.
Just in time for the holidays, you can order seasonal cards, photo books, prints and other gifts for loved ones. Prime members get free shipping.
Find out more about printing at Amazon Photo Printing.
How to Use Family Vault
You can use Family Vault on:
Family Vault is currently available for Amazon Prime members in the US.
Setting Up Your Family Vault
Head to the Amazon Prime Photos page and click the Get Started button.
Sign into your Amazon account and start adding people to the group for your Family Vault. You can send invitations to up to five other people via email by using the Send Invites box.
On the Prime Photos page you’ll see the photos you’ve added to Prime Photos, arranged by date. You can filter these using the categories in the left side bar on the page.
[note] If you don’t yet have any photos added to Prime Photos, now would be a good time to get started adding them. With free unlimited storage at full resolution, Prime Photos is a handy place to back up your photos, store them and free up space on your phone. [/note]
Check the photos you wish to add to your Family Vault, then click Add to Family Vault at the top of the page. You can also choose to just click Add All if you want all of your Prime photos added to the Family Vault.
Hey, why not? Storage is unlimited. But then again, there may be photos you don’t want shared?…
Viewing Family Vault Photos
To view photos in the Family Vault, choose Family Vault on the left side bar, near the top of the Prime Photos page.
You’ll see the photos people from your group have added to your Family Vault.
Your Thoughts
Will you use Amazon Prime Family Vault to share photos with family and friends? Do you like the idea of unlimited photo storage for you and up to five other people? Will you be printing out photos with Amazon?
Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
* New Hampshire Fog photo courtesy of Stanley Zimny via Flickr and Creative Commons
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Hi Carolyn,
Happy Monday 🙂
Informative post indeed! I’d not heard of Amazon Prime Family Vault until now and that we can use it to share photos with family and friends, which sounds interesting, as you can form a group and that makes things so much easier! Isn’t it something like Google Photos? You cannot form groups as such, but we can share them with anyone we like I think.
Would surely be checking it out all in detail soon. Thanks for sharing it with us. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Harleena, Great question! Yes, Google Photos does allow for unlimited photo storage, but not at full resolution. You can also share photos from within Google Photos to others, but Google Photos doesn’t have a Family Vault feature where photos from a group can be found in one place.
Google Photos does work magic with your photos though, creating animations, adding filters, and creating albums. Both are excellent ways to store and share your photos. I’m using both because unlimited is a very good thing.
Thanks for sharing! I wonder how many groups I can form with my Amazon prime account. Google photos is free but good to have an alternative if you are or plan to become an Amazon prime member. Amazon really needs to make an effort to make Amazon Prime attractive. Specially now that many customers are complaining about the 2 day free shipping becoming unreliable thus negating the value that Amazon Prime used to bring for them. Adding more benefits to the Prime membership would definitely make you think twice about renewing or not.
Hi Jen, Yes, I assumed that Amazon would only let you create one Family Vault, but I don’t know that and haven’t read it anywhere. Members of your group don’t have to be Prime members, but let’s say one is with her own membership. Can she the start her own Family Vault with different members of a group? It isn’t clear exactly how it works yet, but it is new, so maybe it’s still being figured out.
I haven’t had problems with Prime 2-day shipping, in fact sometimes packages come early! It is very cool to get new benefits for something I was already satisfied with.
I can’t speak for countries other than the US, but having been a Prime member for about a decade now, it is by far one of the best investments one can make. It used to pay for itself in just shipping costs alone and over the past 5 years it has continually gotten better. I don’t see them losing me as a customer any time soon.
Hi Chris, Good point. Many people signed up for Prime at Amazon before it started adding a lot of other benefits. Learning about more benefits can make Prime members feel even better about their investment in Amazon services.
I hope you enjoy Family Vault, Chris.