How Amazon's unlimited photo storage for Cloud Drive works
Amazon Prime has evolved a lot in recent time. Designed in the beginning as a yearly-paid subscription service to cover all shipping and handling costs for Amazon purchases, it is now offering additional benefits such as TV streaming to customers.
The price of Prime has gone up as well. If you are in the US, you pay $99 per year for it (Amazon Student members pay $49). The price is different in Europe. Here in Germany you pay €49 for instance which is $61 when converted.
The most recent addition to Amazon's Prime service is unlimited photo storage for all Prime customers.
As you may know, Amazon is operating Cloud Drive, an Internet-based file hosting and synchronization service. The basic Cloud Drive plan is free and comes with 5 Gigabyte of storage.
While that does not change, Prime members can upload as many photos as they want to the service without affecting the 5 Gigabyte limit.
According to Amazon, Prime Photos is currently only available in the US. I was able to make use of it as well with my account and while I cannot confirm that it is available worldwide, you may want to try it as well to see if it is the case for you too.
To use Prime Photos, either use the Amazon Cloud Drive application or visit the website directly. There you find listed your plan and whether you benefit from unlimited photo storage.
If unlimited photo storage is enabled for your account you will notice that the storage size of all images on the account does not count against the overall storage quota of it.
Amazon notes that Prime unlimited photo storage is only for non-commercial use.
Limitations
Amazon's Cloud Drive has the following limitations in regards to images:
- A file may not exceed 2 Gigabyte.
- File and folder names cannot exceed 255 characters.
- Photo formats that are supported are: bmp, gif, jpeg, jpg, png, raw, tif and tiff
It is still possible to upload other image formats such as webp but they won't benefit from free storage or be displayed in photos & videos but in all files instead only.
So what happens when you cancel your Prime membership?
If you decide to cancel Amazon Prime at one point in time, all images that you have uploaded to the service will count against your storage quota as soon as Prime expires.
Your account will be limited if that causes the quota to be exceeded. If that is the case you won't be allowed to upload new files to the cloud.
What you are still allowed to do however is to download, view and delete files for "at least three months". Amazon will inform you if the account is still over the quota after the three month period. It may remove files permanently from the account if that is the case.
Cloud Drive is available on the web, as a desktop program for Windows, and as applications for Android and iOS.
Now You: Are you backing up photos in the cloud? If so, which service are you using and why?
Martin, I would appreciate that you do not censor this post, as it’s informative writing.
Onur, there is a misleading statement “[…] GIFs are animated images …”. No, obviously you don’t seem to have take much notice of what you were told back in March regarding; Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
For example, https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/31/whats-gif-explanation-and-how-to-use-it/#comment-4562919 (if you had read my replies within that thread, you might have learnt something useful). I even mentioned, “GIF intrinsically supports animated images (GIF89a)”.
You linked to said article, [Related: …] within this article, but have somehow failed to take onboard what support you were given by several more knowledgeable people.
If you used AI to help write this article, it has failed miserably.
AI is stupid, and it will not get any better if we really know how this all works. Prove me wrong.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYl1sTIOHI
Martin, [#comment-4569908] is only meant to be in: [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/09/how-to-send-gifs-on-iphone-two-different-ways/]. Whereas it appears duplicated in several recent random low-quality non relevant articles.
Obviously it [#comment-4569908] was posted: 9 July 2023. Long before this thread even existed… your database is falling over. Those comments are supposed to have unique ID values. It shouldn’t be possible to duplicate the post ID, if the database had referential integrity.
Don’t tell me!
Ghacks wants the state to step in for STATE-MANDATED associations to save jobs!!!
Bring in the dictatorship!!!
And screw Rreedom of Association – too radical for Ghacks maybe
GateKeeper ?
That’s called “appointing” businesses to do the state’s dirty work!!!!!
But the article says itself that those appointed were not happy – implying they had not choice!!!!!!
@The Dark Lady,
@KeZa,
@Database failure,
@Howard Pearce,
@Howard Allan Pearce,
Note: I replaced the quoted URI scheme: https:// with “>>” and posted.
The current ghacks.net is owned by “Softonic International S.A.” (sold by Martin in October 2019), and due to the fate of M&A, ghacks.net has changed in quality.
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/02/microsoft-is-removing-wordpad-from-windows/#comment-4573130
Many Authors of bloggers and advertisers certified by Softonic have joined the site, and the site is full of articles aimed at advertising and clickbait.
>> ghacks.net/2023/08/31/in-windows-11-the-line-between-legitimate-and-adware-becomes-increasingly-blurred/#comment-4573117
As it stands, except for articles by Martin Brinkmann, Mike Turcotte, and Ashwin, they are low quality, unhelpful, and even vicious. It is better not to read those articles.
How to display only articles by a specific author:
Added line to My filters in uBlock Origin: ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts,.home-category-post:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/01/windows-11-development-overview-of-the-august-2023-changes/#comment-4573033
By the way, if you use an RSS reader, you can track exactly where your comments are (I’m an iPad user, so I use “Feedly Classic”, but for Windows I prefer the desktop app “RSS Guard”).
RSS Guard: Feed reader which supports RSS/ATOM/JSON and many web-based feed services.
>> github.com/martinrotter/rssguard#readme
We all live in digital surveillance glass houses under scrutiny of evil people because of people like Musk. It’s only fair that he takes his turn.
“Operating systems will be required to let the user choose the browser, virtual assistant and search engine of their choice. Microsoft cannot force users to use Bing or Edge. Apple will have to open up its iOS operating system to allow third-party app stores, aka allow sideloading of apps. Google, on the other hand, will need to provide users with the ability to uninstall preloaded apps (bloatware) from Android devices. Online services will need to allow users to unsubscribe from their platform easily. Gatekeepers need to provide interoperability with third-parties that offer similar services.”
Wonderful ! Let’s hope they’ll comply with that law more than they are doing with the GDPR.