Amazon Photos Logged Me Out in the Middle of Upload

two cloud backups are better than one —

Bummed about new Google Photos storage limits? Amazon Photos says "hi"

This surprisingly good photograph service has flown mostly under the radar since 2014.

Enlarge / Amazon Photos offers a desktop PC app, seen here, as well as mobile and browser-based apps.

Jim Salter

In November 2020, Google killed off its long-standing offer of free, unlimited high-resolution photo storage to anyone with a Gmail account. The new restrictions on Google Photos make a lesser-known competitor, Amazon Photos, all of a sudden of greater interest.

Amazon Photos is gratis for anyone with an Amazon account, just without Amazon Prime number membership, yous're limited to 5GiB. But if you lot are a Prime number member, you get unlimited, original-resolution photograph storage at no additional cost. (Videos still have a 5GiB cap.)

In that location's also i gotcha on how the service can be used—according to the TOS, Amazon Photos is for not-commercial, personal use but. You can have photos, y'all can share them with your friends and family, then forth—but you can't run a photography business organisation on the service without violating its terms.

A not-so-new challenger appears

Amazon Photos isn't new—in fact, it launched half dozen years ago, in November 2014. Simply with both iOS and Android offering cloud photo storage built into the operating system itself, Amazon Photos hasn't been every bit high-profile. Google's free, unlimited storage especially fabricated a third competitor seem like a non starter.

However, iCloud and Google both demand subscription fees now for more than a few GiB of storage. In Apple's instance, yous get 5GiB free; in Google's, 15GiB (including Gmail and Gdrive). While this may be plenty for some people, it gives rival Amazon a fresh chance to polish.

Mobile app walkthrough

• Amazon Photos offers automatic, hassle-free backup just like Google and Apple tree do.

  Jim Salter

• If 5GiB isn't plenty space for your videos, you can get 100GiB for $two/mo or 1TiB for $7/mo.

  Jim Salter

• The Android app for Amazon Photos spent several hours chewing through the 11GiB of photos and videos on my telephone. Alert: uploading this much data will put a pain on your battery!

  Jim Salter

• You tin select images stored on Amazon Photos direct from your mobile browser or social media app, just as you would with Google Photos or iCloud.

  Jim Salter

I installed Amazon Photos today and took it for a spin. It automatically backed up all 2,000 or then photos (and 4GiB of video) from my Pixel 2XL over the form of the day without whatsoever trouble. It did non, however, do annihilation with photos that had been deleted from the phone's local storage but were present on the linked Google Photos business relationship. (If you demand to migrate photos directly from Google's cloud to Amazon's, you'll need to practise so manually.)

Amazon Photos is available for use immediately, fifty-fifty while it's backing upwardly your device photos in the groundwork. Information technology was quite responsive and functional during the backup and seemed to exist indexing photos past prototype recognition nearly as apace equally they were uploaded.

Amazon Photos desktop app

• Afterwards downloading and installing the Amazon Photos desktop app, your starting time chore is logging in with your Amazon business relationship.

  Jim Salter

• After logging in to the Amazon Photos desktop app, you're asked to requite it the OK to back upwardly your Pictures (and, optionally, Videos) binder.

  Jim Salter

• Although you can browse photos inside the app itself, viewing or editing them is done in your default Web browser, which the app launches directly to the photo as necessary.

  Jim Salter

There's as well an Amazon Photos desktop app for Windows and macOS. For the virtually office, the desktop app is just a way to automatically sync photos from your PC merely as you would from your telephone. While you can apply information technology to browse your photos, well-nigh all actual work you'd do with them—including but non limited to editing—is done in a Spider web browser window the Photos app launches automatically as and when you demand it.

If you don't want to automatically back up photos and videos from your PC, you don't need the desktop app at all—you lot tin can just visit Amazon Photos directly from your Web browser itself.

Editing photos

• When selecting a photo to edit from the desktop app, it launches in a new browser window—where you may exist warned that editing tin slightly reduce your photograph'south resolution.

  Jim Salter

• In addition to standard crop, rotate, and mirror-image functions, Amazon Photos' online editor has one-click buttons to crop to standard attribute ratios.

  Jim Salter

• Amazon Photos offers a broad variety of filters, only the selection doesn't seem as useful as Google'due south. The interface is also noticeably clunkier.

  Jim Salter

• You can add text to your photos with good control of text size, window size, foreground color, and background color. The font choice isn't not bad, unfortunately.

  Jim Salter

Y'all tin edit photos online, or inside the Amazon Photos mobile app. (Selecting a photo to edit from the desktop app just launches a browser window.) I found the editor serviceable—it offers virtually of the same features Google Photos does, and they operate smoothly and quickly.

There are pros and cons to both Google's and Amazon'south online editors, both of which err on the side of simplicity rather than feature-abyss. Amazon Photos, dissimilar Google, offers automated cropping to common aspect ratios including foursquare, 4:3, and 16:ix. Just Amazon'southward pick of filters seems loaded with not-very-useful crapola, with a significantly clunkier interface than Google's.

Google too gets the win in full general image adjustments. Amazon offers adjustments to brightness, saturation, dissimilarity, gamma, clarity, exposure, shadows, and highlights—but they're all manual. At that place is no counterpart to Google's generally first-class, i-size-fits-all "auto adjust."

Amazon offers text captioning in its browser-based editor, which Google does not—merely the typeface option is limited and pretty crappy. The default "Open Sans" is fine, and Oswald is a perfectly serviceable option if you prefer sarifs—but almost of the rest seem similar the kind of weird crap you lot'd discover in a 1990s desktop publishing program.

The mobile editor on Android is largely similar to the online version pictured in a higher place but with a few more options and a slightly more polished interface. In particular, it offers stickers, overlays, and complimentary-course doodling, none of which are present in the browser version.

Hardcopy, merch, and decor

• Amazon offers prints of your photos in a wide range of options and styles, shipped straight to you—Google just offers to send them to a local drugstore for you.

  Jim Salter

• Amazon also offers a pretty broad multifariousness of print-on-demand decor and merch based on your photos—at that place are many more options here than Google offers.

  Jim Salter

• Google and Amazon both offer canvas prints—merely Amazon's are available upwards to 20x30, where Google's top out at 16x20.

  Jim Salter

Both Amazon and Google offer prints, books, and hangings based on your photos and albums—but I have to hand the decisive win to Amazon in this category on sizes, styles, options—and for the nearly function, price likewise.

When buying photo prints, Google merely gives you one choice—the size of the print, which tin be 4×six, 5×seven, or 8×10 inches. After choosing a size, Google offers you lot a option of local photo printing services—all drugstores, in my surface area—and sends your photo off to the drugstore for you to pick up later.

Amazon offers photograph prints in Glossy, Matte, Lustre, or Pearl finishes in sizes ranging from iv×5.3 inches through a whopping twenty×30 inches and ships them to you directly—and the prices are better, too. Google charges $ii.84, $2.99, or $iii.99 for an 8×ten impress in my expanse, depending on which service I choose—Amazon only wants $1.79 for the same print in either matte or glossy terminate.

Google also offers a sheet wall hanging impress option and a photo book pick. Amazon offers both of those—along with photograph cards, calendars, wood panels, aluminum prints, mugs, blankets, mousepads, Christmas ornaments, and more.

Of grade, y'all can use independent print-on-need services no affair who houses your photos... but if you lot just want to click in your album and make it happen, Google doesn't even seem to exist playing in the aforementioned league as Amazon when it comes to physical merch.

Prototype recognition assisted search

• Amazon Photo'south image recognition is first-class, and for most items at least on par with Google'southward—it had no trouble spotting my grey cat nesting amongst my clean wearing apparel. (Dammit, Mouser...)

  Jim Salter

• In some cases, Amazon Photos really went above and across—come across if you can spot the "cat" in the second photograph.

  Jim Salter

• One identify Amazon differs from Google Photos is in not automatically recognizing all the people in your photos. Whether you consider that a problems or a feature is another question entirely!

  Jim Salter

• Amazon doesn't automatically know who the humans in your photos are, but it does recognize that they ARE humans, and it tin can differentiate betwixt them. Y'all tin give it names for the faces here, if you similar.

  Jim Salter

Amazon'south image recognition assisted search works quite well—easily on par with Google'south and peradventure meliorate, for many categories of object. When searching my photos for "cat," each service got some that the other missed—but Amazon detected more of them by far. (Both services also had trouble figuring out the difference betwixt my cats and my dog—but to be fair, the dog herself has the same trouble.)

In detail, Amazon's image recognition is about uncannily expert at picking out cats in the groundwork—even when they're very minor parts of the image. In the first picture in the gallery in a higher place, it found my gray tabby Mouser in the shadows, nested into my clean laundry, much of which is the same color as he is. In the second, it constitute the creepy, Siamese-cat-shaped 1950s TV lamp on a knick-knack shelf in my role. Google didn't win at "find the cat" in either case, or in many others.

When it comes to detecting humans and putting names to them, Google comes in at a huge and unsurprising advantage—information technology knows who I am, who my wife is, and who my kids are... all by name. Information technology fifty-fifty knows one of my cats past name, although it doesn't seem to have learned who the other cat or the canis familiaris are withal. Amazon doesn't know any of this... which may exist either feature or bug, depending on where your personal privacy<-->convenience slider is set.

Should youdesire Amazon to have a better handle on who your family and friends are, you lot have the pick of applying names to faces in its People dialog, where information technology will show you a option of faces it has discovered in your photos. It'south nonetheless not as good at facial recognition equally Google is, though—information technology but constitute me in 37 photos and my daughter in 7, while Google found pages upon pages of both of us.

Albums, sharing, and Family Vault

• Family Vault is both a way to share photos with shut family and friends as well as give them unlimited photo storage of their own.

  Jim Salter

• Yous can create arbitrary groups of people y'all know and share albums with those groups. You can besides conversation within the group.

  Jim Salter

• Yous tin can add people to a group straight from your contacts or by merely offering a link. You can also send invitations via Email or Facebook.

  Jim Salter

Amazon Photos allows you to organize your photos into albums and to share those albums selectively with friends, family, and/or the entire Internet. Contacts can exist organized into Groups, then you don't need to share albums to twenty different people in your family every time—y'all can brand ane "family" group and just give that group access to the albums they should exist able to see.

Yous can too offer group membership past mode of a special link, rather than directly by contacts—send somebody the link to bring together an Amazon Photos grouping (or publish that link in a blog post) and, presto, they click the link and get immediate access.

In that location's also a "Family unit Vault" whose purpose wasn't spelled out very clearly within the app itself. Basically, the Family Vault is another manner to share photos with 5 of your closest friends and/or family members—you can add any or all photos or albums to the Family Vault, and once added, all upwardly-to-six of yous can run across them. More importantly, your five friends and family get unlimited Amazon Photos storage of their own by way of your Prime business relationship.

As long as any one of the members of a Family Vault has a Prime business relationship in skilful standing, all six share unlimited storage for their own photos. All Family Vault members are able to add—or, crucially,not add together—their photos to the Family Vault, just like the original member does.

Conclusions

Every bit a Prime fellow member—and owner of an aging Pixel 2XL that is starting to have its own deject storage limits imposed—Amazon'southward offer of free and unlimited photograph storage to Prime members defenseless my eye. I've been using Google Photos as an automatic fill-in service for the photos I have with my Pixel for a while now, and information technology performs admirably... merely the new limits brand me nervous.

Afterward spending a day playing with it, I can tell yous that Amazon Photos works perfectly well for my needs, and I suspect information technology will work for most Google Photos users' needs as well. It offers simple editing, including cropping, filters, level adjustment, and fairly flexible text captioning. Yous tin organize photos into albums. Image recognition on par with Google'southward offers photo search capabilities if, for instance, you want to find pictures with cats in them. And your mobile browser and social media apps volition automatically "come across" your Amazon Photos account equally a identify to look when uploading photos, just every bit they exercise with Google Photos.

If y'all're a Prime member, you lot might want to consider Amazon Photos as anadditional service, fifty-fifty if y'all don't plan to supercede Google or Apple outright—it gets you a gratuitous, like shooting fish in a barrel backup if nil else. Accidentally deleted files from Google Photos will still be present on Amazon Photos... and a catastrophic screwup fabricatedby the cloud provider itself won't reach across the aisle, either.

Listing epitome past Getty Images | Leon Neal

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Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/amazon-photos-offers-unlimited-full-resolution-storage-to-prime-members/

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