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Great news for fans of photos! There’s now a place to store all of your photos for free, so long as you’re an Amazon Prime member. Yesterday Amazon announced Prime Photos, free unlimited photo storage as a brand new benefit for its Prime members. With unlimited storage, you can store all of your full resolution photo files without having to worry about running out of space.
How to Use Prime Photo Storage
Prime Photos is available to Amazon Prime members to share unlimited photos in Amazon’s Cloud Drive service.
Storing Your Photos
You can send your photos to Prime Photos storage from your computer or mobile device. Go to the Prime Photos website to get started.
From that site you can sign into your Amazon account on the Web, send the app to your phone, and/or download the Windows application to your PC (Mac users can use Prime Photos on the Web).
The Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app is available for:
- iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch
- Android devices
- Fire Phone and tablets
The app will automatically upload all of your photos from your mobile device into Prime Photo after you sign into your Amazon account.
[note]Not an Amazon Prime member? Find out how to get 1000 GB of free photo storage from Flickr: Flickr – The Solution to Your Photo Storage Issues. [/note]
Viewing Your Photos
Prime Photos not only lets you store photos, the service also give you access to your photos so you can view them on:
- Your Computer
- iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch
- Android phones and tablets
- Amazon Fire TV
- Fire TV stick
- Fire Phone
- PlayStation 3 and 4
- Select LG and Samsung smart TVs
That’s right, all of these devices can now become a digital photo frame for you!
Don’t Miss => Turn Your Computer into a Digital Photo Frame!
You can sort through the photos by date and create albums. You can also share your photos with others from Prime Photos.
Restrictions
While Prime Photo storage is unlimited, Amazon does have some restrictions:
- Each photo must be smaller than 2 GB
Your photos can only be stored using Prime Photo in the following formats:
For photos:
.bmp
.gif
.jpeg
.jpg
.png
.raw
.tif
.tiff
[note] Note that these are the most common formats for photo files so don’t worry if you’re unaware which format your photo files are in. [/note]
Other Prime Benefits
Unlimited photo storage is the latest benefit Amazon has given to Prime members. Other benefits include:
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than 20 million eligible items
- Prime Instant Video — instant streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes
- Prime Music — streaming of one million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — access to borrowing over 600,000 books
- Early access to select Lightning Deals
Check out => Is Amazon Prime Worth $99 for You? Here’s How to Decide!
Availability
Prime Photos is available to members of Amazon Prime US. You can become a member of Amazon Prime for $99/year at Amazon’s website. One year of Amazon Prime comes free with the purchase of the Fire Phone.
Amazon Cloud Drive
Prime Photos are stored in Amazon Cloud Drive, a service similar to Dropbox where you can store files in the Cloud. Amazon offers 5 GB of storage free for anyone (Prime and non-Prime), but charges for more storage:
If you’re using Cloud Drive to store your photos and need more than 50 GB of space (about 10,000 photos), you can save money by signing up for Prime membership and getting unlimited photo storage for free!
Note that other file storage, such as video, document and music files, aren’t (yet) included in this Prime benefit.
Your Thoughts
Are you excited about having unlimited photo storage with Amazon Prime Photos? Would this benefit be an incentive for you to join Amazon Prime? Do you like the idea of all of your photos being available to view on many different devices? Where do you store your digital photos? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments section below!
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Congratulations to Rob Has a Podcast!
One of my favorite podcasters, Rob Cesternino, a former Survivor contestant, recorded his 1000th podcast this week. His podcast, Rob Has a Podcast, covers reality TV shows such as Survivor, Amazing Race, Big Brother and more. He also has two other Podcasts:
- Reality TV RHAP Ups — about other reality shows
- Post Show Recaps — about scripted TV shows such as Game of Thrones, House of Cards and Walking Dead
Don’t miss => Passionate About Podcasts!
Rob is celebrating his major milestone with a gift to his listeners:
The Rob Has a Podcast (RHAP) app. This app for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch is an easy way to access his podcasts and get breaking news about shows he covers. You can also listen to and download sound bytes from the shows. Download the RHAP app from iTunes.
Links to Rob’s podcasts can be found on the Rob Has a Website website. If you’re a reality TV fan, be sure to sample one of Rob’s podcasts for entertaining, intelligent and humorous conversations!
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* Rose image by Mario via Flickr and Creative Commons
*Amazon Box Image (edited) by sⓘndy° via Flickr and Creative Commons
Hi Carolyn,
I like this new feature and as a current member of Amazon Prime, it would be one I want to use for sure. I do wonder, though, if I don’t renew my membership at some point, what would happen to the cloud account? Would it simply revert to my paying for the cloud storage alone? That would seem to be the answer…
Hi Daragh, I’m glad you’re excited about this new benefit too! Yes, it will be very handy to have automatic uploads and unlimited storage.
Great question about what happens if you don’t renew your Prime membership. Here is the information from Amazon:
“If you cancel or do not renew your Prime membership, you will lose the unlimited photo storage benefit associated with the membership and your uploaded photos will count toward your Cloud Drive storage limit. For more information about your Cloud Drive storage limits and what happens to your content if you exceed those limits, go to About Cloud Drive Storage Limits.”
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=footer_prlmdoc?nodeId=201480950
This is a great feature for amazon prime members – my only tiny concern would be how secure are the cloud servers
Hi Jon, Great question. Amazon is known for having extremely secure servers. From Amazon:
“Amazon’s world-class security and protection keeps your content safe—even if your phone, tablet, or computer is lost or damaged.”
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore?ref_=cd_primepage_cdlm
Of course, any time you store files in the Cloud you have some risk. For example, if someone looks over your shoulder and steals your password to your Amazon account, they could access your photos on Cloud Drive. But you have to balance that risk against the risk that your phone is lost or stolen and you lose all of your pictures.
With digital files, just as with physical property, there is no 100% guarantee of safety even with the most secure servers.
Hi Carolyn,
I have been busy this weekend and its good to see your posts again.
Yes! Free storage in the 1TB and above has become quite a fad these days.
Its all very kind of these companies to offer their storage free as an incentive for people to join.
Having been a member of Flickr for about a decade, its not new to me. and as a Flickr Pro for many years, it felt good. Yes its nice to be able to have free web albums out these for others to see and appreciate, but which self respecting photographer would load up photos on a public sharing site in full view to the entire world as it were? I would not.
I have only my best photo finished ones uploaded. In fact, if I edited my Flickr account it be to would delete rather than add photos. Other than to see how much you have progressed, it does not feel good to see photos which you could have done a much better job on in the past displayed in close proximity to your excellent latest creations.
As a supposedly Pro member, the viewer will always assume that what you post is the best you can produce! You are judged on photos in Flickr and can receive bouquets or brickbats.
I for one will not use any amount of space provided even free, considering I have been at it for more than 45 years. My archived photographic material is huge and would never feel safe in some one else’s hands.
I was in the medical transcription industry for 10 years and know the need for safety. Photos are as private as health files in these days of cyber snooping.
Even the average family photo could fall prey to unscrupulous hackers.
The danger of identity theft is too large a subject to avoid also.
It is something that young people need to be taught until they get a rude shock, seeing themselves in unwanted places suddenly.
From personal experience with my early use of smart phones. I was horrified to see photos that were not to be seen on the net neatly arranged in folders on my Google pictures back up. Android phones do this with Google accounts and unless you turn the auto back up off on your phone it could be a very embarrassing moment when you find a whole bunch of junk shared on your site. You could also decide to share a photo and end up sharing the wrong one by mistake. in this instance they are already loaded in the cloud just waiting for a click to be shared.
Yes! You can switch it off. Should it not be the “off” by default?
Perhaps I digress here, but the subject is quite big.
I have to point out that maintaining several prime accounts is also a needless expense.
Flickr Pro, 500px Pro, ViewBug Pro, etc., to name just a few, just adds up to monthly/yearly expense. With storage so cheap these days, why use cloud storage except for those photos you would store on a phone or share on a social media site.
These shareable photos are also ones you do not mind people copying etc and are low res. Those are the only ones I would store in cloud storage.
It makes perfect sense mind you for a travelling pro, but any pro would not store low res and send the large file only on request.
With cloud drives available with every free mail. One can easily do that. As a prolific but choosy photographer, sharing is also a very careful and thought about process for me.
For photographers who want to sell their photos these Prime or VIP memberships are useful. For the average user I do not believe it is necessary, or even wise.
My advice, be choosy with your photos. Junk those that you would not watch again unless it contains some precious memories, or is an excellent photo to be remembered.
Delete, erase, shred the excess and keep the best archived and organised, is my advice to anyone who wants to collect images. Do not hoard junk. You could spend the major part of time available sorting rather than viewing for pleasure or gain.
Sorry for the long comment, but it is something very close to the heart. I could probably carry on about it. Enough said already.
Nick
Hi Nick, You’re right, it’s very important to check your privacy settings and not rely on the default settings. I completely agree, the default setting should always be more privacy, not less.
You can filter your privacy settings on Flickr to sharing with public, friends + family, just family or no one. You can set these per photo or per album so you don’t have to make every photo public or private.
Flickr really is a phenomenal resource, but you’re right, some people need more space than 1 TB, which is why this news from Amazon is so exciting!
Please include psd picture files also for prime photos
Hi William, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! Great idea to add Photoshop files to Amazon Prime Photos. You should suggest that to Amazon to improve the service.