Amazon Prime Unlimited Photo Storage @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Amazon Prime Unlimited Photo Storage - This is not our usual subject matter, at all. But surely there are a lot of HardOCP readers that are also Amazon Prime members and a lot of us like a good deal. So is Amazon Prime's new free photo storage up to what us [H]'ers would expect. When it is too good to be true is it always too good to be true?
 
No thanks. I have unlimited storage on OneDrive. Think I will stick with that for my 'cloud' solution.
 
Balthazar2k4 said:
No thanks. I have unlimited storage on OneDrive. Think I will stick with that for my 'cloud' solution.
Click to expand...

I do use OneDrive as well, but the 15GB limit is the sticking point for me and I don't want to pay MS $120 for the 1TB storage. I have been doing my best to get away from Office applications as well and now Google Docs handles most of that I need. For what it will not handle, my Office 2007 suite still works just fine. If I had a reason for Office, it would certainly be an option.

To the point made in the article, we have a tremendous amount of our readership that already has Amazon Prime, so I thought I would see if "unlimited" really meant it. :)
 
This is good for a locker. I posted about what I did with an NEF in the news thread.

I'd like this to have a gallery too and then I could replace Flickr

I have found a few things I want/issues. You're able to share pictures from here however it's one at a time. I can't share an album with someone. If I go to a friend's party and shoot a 100+ photos and I've got them stored here, they can't have a one shot at them. Sharing by phone (android) brings up the sharing intent window, I didn't look at it closely but I wish it would show you a screen with the URL and then a share button in case I want to put it into something not in the share intent window. I wish for an option on the photo uploaders that would single out non-prime content and give you the option to not upload it or remove it if you select to upload anything.

I do like that if I drop a folder of pictures in there it automatically becomes an album so I don't have to fiddle with that. So far when I download an item it's the original file.

I like this more than Google's auto backup as there is no limit in size or resolution. I can turn it on and just forget about it.
 
Man, writing a fluff article is a really convoluted way to post a ton of referral links.
 
Thank you for this article for real.

My wife is a photgropher and Ive been kicking around all kinds of storage options but none of them was an offsite option. I always tell her I dont give a damn if our house burns down or someone breaks in and steals all of our computer equipment, the pictures she has of family,shoots,weddings and our daughter growing up are more important to me. When we go on vacation, I take my hard drives out my computers and store them at my parents house with the back up of that drive at her moms house. We have over 560gigs of pictures(yes just pictures) that we cannot lose period.

I just purchased 2 of the WD ultra 2tb drives and keep in the house and one in our glove.

We will get to uploading right now and with our 10meg upload, it will take for ever.
 
Looks like the real deal.

What happens when I'm dead?:eek::eek:

Dear Magoo:

Your Prime subscription has lapsed.
You have 90 days to replace your Prime Photo Cloud......or all your photos are belong to us.

Thank you.
Amazon.
 
magoo said:
What happens when I'm dead?:eek::eek:
Click to expand...

The truth? No one cares.:D

I doubt your offspring will care too much over 1000's of awful digital photos. My parents have several volumes of photos of my family going back to the turn of the 19/20th century. Do I care? Nope. All getting thrown on a bonfire after they are gone. I don't have room for this junk. Never met em, never gonna care about them.

Like folks on hi-fi forums worrying about how long burnt CDs will last of their needles drops. They only have to last their lifetime as its all going in a skip the next week after they've died.

Let's be honest here...
 
SilkySalamandr said:
Thank you for this article for real.

My wife is a photgropher and Ive been kicking around all kinds of storage options but none of them was an offsite option. I always tell her I dont give a damn if our house burns down or someone breaks in and steals all of our computer equipment, the pictures she has of family,shoots,weddings and our daughter growing up are more important to me. When we go on vacation, I take my hard drives out my computers and store them at my parents house with the back up of that drive at her moms house. We have over 560gigs of pictures(yes just pictures) that we cannot lose period.

I just purchased 2 of the WD ultra 2tb drives and keep in the house and one in our glove.

We will get to uploading right now and with our 10meg upload, it will take for ever.
Click to expand...

This was truly my concern as well. And photos are something that are added to all the damn time, but we take it for granted when it comes to actually backing these things up. I feel a lot better with this solution for sure and since I already pay for Prime, this brings a lot more value to the membership.
 
bigstusexy said:
This is good for a locker. I posted about what I did with an NEF in the news thread.

I'd like this to have a gallery too and then I could replace Flickr.
Click to expand...

Considering how simple it would be to replicate a Flickr, I would guess Amazon is not wanting to actually challenge that business. I imagine Flickr's outband bandwidth cost is huge.
 
Might give this a try when I have time. Thanks for trying it out and posting the review.
 
Well I set it to upload all my pics up over night. Unfortunately it didn't work. The process stalled because my cloud maxed out (bc I have some video files in the same folders as the picture files).

I really don't understand why it wouldn't just finish uploading my pictures and stop uploading anything else it found.
 
Will have to check it out, I have about 60GB of photos backed up to my WHS and also offsite via CrashPlan. Another cloud option wont hurt, especially since i already use prime.

hopefully Amazon will improve the prime music offering next, they need a LOT more music available.
 
Hmm. Do they reencode pictures? I mean as a programmer I could pretty easily make photos store any data I want hidden in the bits that compose the photo. Although its not like I have a prime account.
 
Also to be clear (as I got excited and when reading got a little confused)
It's only photos that are free, video is storage. Meh, not a problem.

One thing I will say is that their upload is SMOOTH and way better than Flickr which no longer has their own desktop app and I've had a huge issue with them telling me files aren't valid.
 
So, it says .raw is supported. But my Nikon camera takes .jpg (supported, I know) and .nef, the Nikon raw format. Does this mean that if I set it up to sync my photos, it will only grab the .jpgs?
 
drescherjm said:
Hmm. Do they reencode pictures? I mean as a programmer I could pretty easily make photos store any data I want hidden in the bits that compose the photo. Although its not like I have a prime account.
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As is linked in the conclusion, no.

bigstusexy said:
Also to be clear (as I got excited and when reading got a little confused)
It's only photos that are free, video is storage. Meh, not a problem.

One thing I will say is that their upload is SMOOTH and way better than Flickr which no longer has their own desktop app and I've had a huge issue with them telling me files aren't valid.
Click to expand...

Yep, just pictures.

Modred189 said:
So, it says .raw is supported. But my Nikon camera takes .jpg (supported, I know) and .nef, the Nikon raw format. Does this mean that if I set it up to sync my photos, it will only grab the .jpgs?
Click to expand...

.nef I am sure is supported for storage, but I do not think you can use those for the free portion or for the display portion. If you share out a .nef file with me, I can give it a try and see what happens.
 
For more than pictures use the desktop app for pc. I saved My Documents folder and Favorites, and all my game saves.
 
Modred189 said:
So, it says .raw is supported. But my Nikon camera takes .jpg (supported, I know) and .nef, the Nikon raw format. Does this mean that if I set it up to sync my photos, it will only grab the .jpgs?
Click to expand...


It's not * supported * but it works for now at least.
It recognized the tiny tiff thumbnail in the file and took it. That's all you'll see. Later when I downloaded, it gave me the original file back.
 
bigstusexy said:
It's not * supported * but it works for now at least.
It recognized the tiny tiff thumbnail in the file and took it. That's all you'll see. Later when I downloaded, it gave me the original file back.
Click to expand...


That is good to know!
 
I'm sure absolutely nothing wrong will ever happen by uploading all your precious memories to Amazon.
 
bigstusexy said:
This is good for a locker. I posted about what I did with an NEF in the news thread.

I'd like this to have a gallery too and then I could replace Flickr

I have found a few things I want/issues. You're able to share pictures from here however it's one at a time. I can't share an album with someone. If I go to a friend's party and shoot a 100+ photos and I've got them stored here, they can't have a one shot at them. Sharing by phone (android) brings up the sharing intent window, I didn't look at it closely but I wish it would show you a screen with the URL and then a share button in case I want to put it into something not in the share intent window. I wish for an option on the photo uploaders that would single out non-prime content and give you the option to not upload it or remove it if you select to upload anything.

I do like that if I drop a folder of pictures in there it automatically becomes an album so I don't have to fiddle with that. So far when I download an item it's the original file.

I like this more than Google's auto backup as there is no limit in size or resolution. I can turn it on and just forget about it.
Click to expand...

actually i recently found a setting in google to not change the size or resolution, but it will eat up your data allotment faster, which isnt an issue if you download them and save them to multiple locations and delete them from the cloud every couple years, haha!
 
I am a Prime member and this is cool. I am always happy to have more services for my money. The 2 day shipping is worth it to me. However, Microsoft is crushing it right now. Their new services focus on every platform is pretty amazing.

An Office 365 sub at $100 a year is just too compelling not to go for. Full Office on 5 devices and free on iOS and Android. Now that they have upped OneDrive to unlimited, that is worth the price of the sub alone. I use OneDrive all the time to work on stuff both at work and home and always have an updated copy. I am going to upload my photos soon. I think I only have about 10GB. I also have a huge music collection that I started on back in the late 90's. I need to go through it but I am going to put it all up as well.

For about $8 per month, I have just decided to build the 365 sub into a fixed cost. All of my important stuff will be backed up and I really enjoy being able to use things like OneNote on whatever device I want and always have access to my files.
 
The 2 day shipping is worth it to me.
Click to expand...

I seem to get 2 day shipping using the free express saver for most items. Although I am not complaining about that...
 
Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried doing sha256sum on their photos to make sure that what comes out is the same as what goes in?

Personally, I wouldn't use it unless it is perfect.
 
drescherjm said:
I seem to get 2 day shipping using the free express saver for most items. Although I am not complaining about that...
Click to expand...

Then you're very lucky. In the last 6 months or so, I've found that Amazon sits on orders for at least 3 days if you take free shipping. In the past, orders shipped the same day if I ordered early and the next day if I didn't (assuming items were in stock).
 
the_servicer said:
Just out of curiosity, has anyone tried doing sha256sum on their photos to make sure that what comes out is the same as what goes in?

Personally, I wouldn't use it unless it is perfect.
Click to expand...

I'd be shocked if they did anything to the images. JPG files are tiny and applying lossy compression to a lossless file (e.g. TIFF or BMP) defeats the purpose of storing in those formats. Storage is cheap and very few people are going to upload terabytes of TIFFs
 
nilepez said:
Storage is cheap and very few people are going to upload terabytes of TIFFs
Click to expand...

Maybe when they figure out how to embed their system images in TIFF files using some linux utility that generates 2GB TIFFs that contain the data as pixels.
 
No change in the images I checked... and well I threw up a NSFW folder up there and to be honest I'd love a copy of the browser coding for my offline stuff lol...
 
This looks like a much easier solution than my current S3 Glacier + custom script upload. Thanks for the heads up, Kyle! Maintaining multiple physical backups is such a pain the patooky due to diffs so I prefer cloud storage for fam pics and folder sync points.
 
The title said photos...

But videos too?

I've been using Google Drive now because of syncing across all devices. But now this. I create and store new photos and videos daily.
More reason why I'm glad I didn't buy the 128GB iPhone and Adobe Creative Cloud Storage.

Money saved.
 
SultanGris said:
actually i recently found a setting in google to not change the size or resolution, but it will eat up your data allotment faster, which isnt an issue if you download them and save them to multiple locations and delete them from the cloud every couple years, haha!
Click to expand...

Years, more like months. I take a lot of pictures and would post them to G+ It's not so bad if you don't mind loosing all the comments on the pictures, which I do.
 
So I just tried something today.

I wanted to get rid of all the videos I have since I don't really care and nor want them to eat up my data limit. I went searching for them under all files (.avi .mp4, etc) nothing came up. I went to a folder I know has video and did the same. nothing. I found one and put in the name, nope!

The search is case sensitive and you must hit it exactly from the beginning. As far as I can tell there are no wildcards. This is bad as the upload tools are actually file upload tools, they'll take anything. I've got a few text files up the

I went to the photo and video side and then to videos which will pull them all from all folders. I wanted to mass delete from there but there you can only select one at a time. You can select them all before deleting, I just have more than a few and I don't feel like endlessly clicking right now.

So file management needs some improvement but meh.
 
Every cloud sharing application and service that I've tried is super slow, or has some imposing regulations, is too expensive.... etc...

I've recently found out about bittorrent sync. It is a phenomenal program.

Now, Between my two brothers and my father, we have a "family Sync" folder that gets duplicated across everyone's computers immediately over the internet. Now my files exist in 4 places that I trust, I'm even now rethinking even using RAID anymore, since I basically have a "Raid 1" across 4 drives in different places in the world. If my house burns down, I just reenter the private key and boom all my files sync down again from the other remaining nodes.

Its also super quick (its only limited by the capacity of your internet on both sides). It even lets you browse your files on mobile devices, without actually downloading the entire archive (which is unlimited by the way). That way you can download a single file and view it easily.

Don't waste your money or risk your private data on cloud services.
 
I gave this a shot over the weekend. Uploaded my 166 GB 48,000+ photos. The upload app timed out a few times requiring me to restart it. The app then had to check what was already uploaded vs. what was left. That took quite a lot of time.

In the end it worked and I got everything uploaded. I suppose for a one time shot of raw storage it's fine. But without any robust syncing capability it's too crude for me to want to keep uploading my changes/updates.
 
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