
Amazon Prime Members’ Newest Benefit Is Free, Unlimited Photo Storage - nikunjk
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/amazon-prime-members-newest-benefit-is-free-unlimited-photo-storage/
======
ihiram
Small test. Uploaded 2 files from my mac. Output from shasum:

    
    
      bead69d062c53436f19b6577ec7b524b9aa54445  DSC_0010.JPG
      83ade975de96b81d272642740e06480fbc1484e1  DSC_0010.NEF
    

Downloaded each file from Amazon Prime Photos. Filenames preserved. Filesizes
the same. Output from shasum:

    
    
      bead69d062c53436f19b6577ec7b524b9aa54445  DSC_0010.JPG
      83ade975de96b81d272642740e06480fbc1484e1  DSC_0010.NEF
    

Lock-in and missing features aside, preserving the binary data is pretty cool,
and it's honestly the most important thing when picking a place to store
photos (for me).

The most annoying thing was it treated the NEF and JPG files separately, and
showed pictures twice in the UI.

~~~
swartkrans
I'm pretty sure Dropbox doesn't change the binary data. What service changes
it?

~~~
arenaninja
Some time ago someone posted that SkyDrive (now OneDrive) did

~~~
nickbarnwell
Disclaimer: MSFT-employed.

It's OneDrive for Business (i.e. SharePoint) that sometimes modifies uploaded
files. To the best of my knowledge, OneDrive Consumer
([http://onedrive.com](http://onedrive.com)) operates no differently than
`rsync` would.

~~~
killerpopiller
how/why?

~~~
robododo
They are completely unrelated products, except for branding.

Yeah, I know. Sigh.

~~~
mieko
I've seen Microsoft employees across the web have to point this out a dozen
times.

"The New Microsoft" seems to be making better decisions overall, but it
apparently didn't learn anything from the early-2000s ".net branding
clusterfuck" which conflated their runtime platform, development tools,
consumer-facing single-sign-on, and a few dozen other things in the mind of
the public.

~~~
larp
I think you nailed it.

Perhaps out of hope but more likely Stockholm syndrome, over the last decade I
seem to have got stuck in a cycle of: Blind love and hope for a new product of
theirs, utter disappointment at the resulting clusterfuck after a week,
hatred, switch to something else, miss it, go crawling back.

Only just broken out of this loop but to be honest it knackered my
productivity badly over the years.

Ultimately I'm a sucker I suspect but the revelation that FreeBSD hadn't
actually poked me in the eye once in the last decade had turned my hand
finally. That and ruby.

Yes I got tangled in DNA, ATL etc as well. Nothing but regret.

------
chuckcode
Am I just being cynical when I think that all new free photo storage just
means that automated image recognition software has gotten good enough that
companies want to process all my images and target me better? Is this like
gmail where they get to machine read all your emails or is this the type of
cloud that is just storage?

~~~
simonw
A better cynical view is that this is about lockin. You're much less likely to
cancel your $99/year account if you'll have to transfer terabytes of photos to
a different provider.

Acquiring new customers is always significantly more expensive than retaining
existing customers.

~~~
johnloeber
This is a very good point. The "free" storage comes at the cost of being
strongly disincentivized from ever cancelling your Prime Subscription.

~~~
brandoncapecci
Why would you cancel your Prime Subscription to begin with? As someone who
gets more than the price of Prime on shipping items alone, all these
additional services are just bonuses to what is already an insanely cost-
effective subscription.

~~~
dublinben
You can pay for a lot of two-day shipping with $100 a year. I don't want all
these dubious "value-add" services, like Prime Instant Video, Kindle Library,
Prime Music, and now this photo storage service.

~~~
d23
I'm pretty sure I get $100/year worth of 2 day shipping out of Prime quite
easily, but I'm starting to agree on the other points.

What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3
or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such
as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all
day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of
effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and
interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited
shipments.

Anybody else had similar experiences?

~~~
lettercarrier
Prime packages are treated better than Express; tracked better and always
delivered. In my PO nothing is more important. A misthrow of a media mail or
regular parcel gets delivered the next day (misthrow = put in the wrong hamper
and not noticed until the truck gets loaded; the correct carrier has left);
whereas if a Prime parcel is a misthrow, they send one of the "gargoyles"
(i.e. newly minted temporary $16.50 hr workers) to deliver it that day.

Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it
or expect it.

USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with
that figure). EDIT orig reversed

True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the
nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock
on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The
package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an
extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime
parcels.]

If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or
"unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or
most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the
parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want
wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are
exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them
on a wet set of stairs);

~~~
d23
> If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or
> "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock")
> or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put
> the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't
> want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are
> exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave
> them on a wet set of stairs);

Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that
doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered,
particularly for USPS.

------
blisterpeanuts
[https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos](https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos)

(If you don't feel like visiting TechCrunch.)

Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you
can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and
keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.

If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you
should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you
to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them
all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case,
why pay extra for AMZN's service?

I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's
convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a
hard drive periodically.

There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take
our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a
pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?

~~~
IgorPartola
Doing exactly what you are suggesting, I will tell you why it's a much bigger
cost than just the cost of the drive.

\- The Seagate drive you mention has horrible failure rates, IIRC.

\- Unless you know how to set up and monitor a ZFS pool, don't bother. Your
data will _not_ survive without this.

\- Are you confident enough in your backup solution? Are your backups offsite?
Are they offsite on another ZFS pool, or similar mechanism? Do you check your
backups for integrity? What is your strategy for when backups (or original
data) is corrupt?

\- Does your home grown solution provide a secure sync capability between all
your devices? Alternatively, do you have access to the photos from all your
devices?

\- Does your home grown solution allow your friends and family to
view/download a subset of the photos from any of their devices?

\- Is your solutions online a reasonable percentage of the time?

\- Is your home grown solution as fast as AWS? As in, if you are traveling and
want access to your data, how fast will it download/upload?

Basically, unless you plan on spending quite a bit of time setting this up,
and know what you are doing, it is much much cheaper to pay from Prime, or
similar.

Edit: BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it,
expect corruption. Same goes for your other box, the backup you host offsite.

~~~
pyre
> BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it, expect
> corruption.

That's a rather strong statement to make.

~~~
laymil
It's a rather fair statement to make. The rates of errors in memory are
significant[1], and ZFS does nothing to ensure that in memory data structures
are uncorrupted; it was designed to be used with ECC RAM[2].

[1][http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf)
[2][http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-
memory.html](http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html)

------
zoul
What’s superbly dumb is that we can’t use the storage and the clients
interchangeably. The storage is almost always tied to the clients. I _so_ wish
I could just start the photo app of my choice and simply pointed it to my
single paid cloud storage with a standardized API, be it from Google, Apple,
Amazon or DropBox.

~~~
jmathai
There's no commercial market for what you're describing [4]. I spent 3 years
building it [1]. It's all open source[2] and was funded by the Shuttleworth
Foundation[3].

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-
pho...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo-
service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a)

[2] [https://github.com/photo](https://github.com/photo)

[3] [https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-
mathai...](https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai/)

[4] [https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-
phot...](https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-photo-
internet-service-b1234eaf75b)

 _edit: added link #4_

------
leejoramo
Agree with Dave Winer on this:

> Amazon talks about ways of accessing photos, but does not include an API, or
> even RSS. Why?? What a waste.

[https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/529637391951495168](https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/529637391951495168)

I have looked at so many photo services and nothing is providing the tools or
sustainable business plan that I am looking for.

~~~
mercwear
Part of this may be due to the fact that they are not trying to attract
businesses with this change. In fact, the terms of service say that you cannot
use this offer if it's for commercial purposes. I agree that an API would be
very nice though.

~~~
bengali3
> that they are not trying to attract businesses with this change

Agree. anything 'included with prime' lately makes me think its really to
better understand & sell to primers, rather than gain new ones.

------
VLM
I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to
G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.

Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping,
so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with
free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other
competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of
the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma
would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.

~~~
k2enemy
> I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to
> G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.

I know what you mean. Lately I've gotten the impression that companies aren't
offering photo storage as a feature to entice more people to use their
services, but that they _want_ our photos for some reason. Maybe advances in
image recognition let them use the photos to mine marketable data?

~~~
jrockway
I think it's simpler than this; they want to fully utilize their compute
resources so they can squeeze suppliers for better prices. If Amazon can get a
one cent discount on hard drives by buying more, then Amazon.com is cheaper to
run.

------
MrSlo
And a couple of days ago Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers gets
unlimited OneDrive storage
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517475)).
Which also can upload all your photos...

~~~
Chevalier
I just wish OneDrive worked. I tried uploading 60k photos or so (less than
100GB)... OneDrive wouldn't even START the upload, and choked at 0.0kb
uploaded. And even if it had started, OneDrive has a ridiculously low 20k file
limit. I don't know why Microsoft has these weird bugs when everyone else
seems to have it together.

With OneDrive and Amazon offering unlimited storage, it can't be long until
Google and Dropbox (whose clients actually work) offer the same. But Google
had better step up soon. I really don't see why I should continue to pay for
GDrive when Amazon bundles unlimited storage with my already-essential Prime
membership.

------
Justsignedup
TBH I just tried it out, not as useful as previously thought.

$8.25 a month to get unlimited photo storage. It does not, however, give you
ability to share albums, just individual files. Which makes it meh, since I
can't share entire albums with people, which is what I'd want to do if I
upload all my photos.

~~~
darkstar999
> $8.25 a month

Or "free" if you already had Prime. I can't see anyone signing up for it just
for this new service.

------
simonsarris
I'm super happy about this!

I have been looking for a way to easily offsite backup my photos without
adding another row in my "cost of being alive"[1] spreadsheet (which already
contains Prime). I don't need to access them, it doesn't have to be fancy, I
just want to keep them safe at a second location.

[1] Add up all the monthly/yearly services you pay for so that if you did
literally nothing at all, that's the amount you'd be charged per month. Things
like github, prime, linode, gym, parking permit, ACM membership, etc. That's
your cost to just be alive (before choosing to consume anything).

------
kin
It's interesting. I signed up for Prime just for shipping. Now, I'm getting
all these services "free". Granted, Prime's price increases here and there.
But, because it's "free", it's easy for me to want to use it.

Eventually I'm going to be using so many Prime services that I'll never want
to cancel it.

~~~
wmeredith
I'm exactly the opposite. I signed up for Prime for free shipping. They keep
bundling it with more and more crap that I don't use. And it's not "free", the
price is rising. I'll cancel if this keeps up.

~~~
baldfat
$100 and Amazon is still losing money on shipping alone. I don't see any of
this as a "waste."

$150 and I would still save on shipping.

------
baldfat
CrashPlan+ for less then $5 a month unlimited backup. Also it runs on my Linux
server and I can have all my computers and family computers backup to the
linux machine for free then the Linux box is backed up.

~~~
pavel_lishin
One problem with Crashplan is that it seems to be all-or-nothing.

I've got it running on my desktop at home; I've got gigs and gigs of photos
there. My macbook doesn't have enough free disk space to store all of them -
and Crashplan doesn't let me store and sync just the 2014 photos.

~~~
elmuchoprez
Backblaze is $5/month (per machine) and let's you grab single files (or
directories) from your backup if you want.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Does it do selective sync? e.g., HOME:/media/pictures contains folders for
2014...etc, and LAPTOP:/media/pictures/ only contains 2014, and any changes to
LAPTOP:/media/pictures/2014/ get propagated to HOME:/media/pictures/2014 etc?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
It's not a sync service, it's a backup service.

The flow is directories on your machine > BackBlaze.

Anything in the other direction is manual.

------
gordon_freeman
Unlimited photo storage was long due IMO. I remember when Google launched
Gmail with 1GB storage, they blew away all the competitors such as
AOL,Yahoo,Hotmail. That was the great customer acquisition move by Google. I
kept wondering why nobody came forward with unlimited cloud storage or
specifically photo storage!

Also speaking strictly about the services I tried -- \-- started using free
Dropbox with camera uploads and with all friends referrals increased upto 10
GBs which is ultimately not good enough when you auto-upload images from phone
camera. \-- Then started using Flickr with 1 TB which does not have desktop
client for simple drag-and-drop. \-- Inconveniently tried using Google Drive
on-and-off but simply cumbersome.

Seems as a Primer subscriber, I will find this service valuable for auto-
camera upload.

~~~
vidarh
> I kept wondering why nobody came forward with unlimited cloud storage or
> specifically photo storage!

Gmail could do that because "nobody" stored much e-mail. They could be on the
case that most people would acquire more archived e-mail at a rate low enough
that storage costs would drop quickly enough to cover a large percentage of
the growth. In the end it also wasn't all that big deal when it came to
customer acquisition: The major competitors all followed after they realised
that it wouldn't drive their costs up all that much.

Pictures are different. They are already big. And everyone have lots of
pictures. The _main_ reason for signing up for cloud storage for pictures is
that you have too many of them to store on your phone/tablet/other small
devices, while for e-mail features, and network effects (all those people that
knows your e-mail address) mattered far more than storage (consider that e.g.
Yahoo charged to upgrade to 50MB or 100MB storage before Gmail, and almost
nobody did - the free amount was sufficient for most users).

This is viable for Amazon because Prime customers are highly valuable and 1)
we pay, 2) retaining us is worth lots of money - I've been up to over 200
orders a year from Amazon some years, 3) Amazon by now has years of experience
driving down the cost of image storage, 4) it helps as a way of driving
customers to their Fire platform (e.g. photos and videos in the Amazon cloud
account show up on the Fire TV)

------
jaredmcdonald
What happens if you drop your Prime membership?

~~~
rada
There is an option to "Download All Files".

~~~
agildehaus
Yes, but for how long? What if my credit card expires and I forget to update
it? Is there a 30 day grace period for downloading them or are they wiped
immediately?

------
Spooky23
They jacked up the price of Amazon Prime significantly and play games with the
shipping times compared to when the service first came out. Since most people
probably subscribed in the 4th quarter. My guess is they've

So just like politicians roll out the pork before Election Day, Amazon is
giving us all sorts of wonderful things to keep Prime around into the new
year. (Example: the TV stick that doesn't ship until mid January)

------
derengel
Of one drive, idrive and google drive I stick with dropbox because of its CLI
linux client, are there any alternatives to dropbox for this?

~~~
cplease
[http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/three-alternatives-
ubuntu...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/three-alternatives-ubuntu-one)

Copy looks promising. If you're willing to pay you use a service like
rsync.net, or if you're willing to do a bit of setup you can just use any old
shared hosting or VPS service. Or owncloud for some sugar.

~~~
rsync
rsync.net has a special new-customer discount for HN readers (and has for a
long time). Just email and ask for it.

------
mikecarlton
Flickr offers 1TB photo storage free (with ads, $50/year without adds). How
many of us have > 1TB of photos?

And they've got an api [https://help.yahoo.com/kb/flickr/difference-free-free-
flickr...](https://help.yahoo.com/kb/flickr/difference-free-free-flickr-
sln8863.html)

~~~
krisdol
That's awesome. Do they compress uploads? Can I upload RAW images?

~~~
ValentineC
Flickr isn't great for hardcore photographers with plenty of RAW images. They
don't keep metadata and filenames of the originals, and you won't be able to
upload RAW images.

~~~
ghaff
I'm reasonably hardcore and find Flickr Pro fine--but for sharing and
otherwise having them available online. It only functions as a backup in a
"very worst case scenario" sort of sense. I use BackBlaze to store my Raw
images (in addition to local backups).

~~~
matwood
Same. I think Flickr is a good worst case scenario backup. I still need to
back up all of my RAWs somewhere. I work with s3 all day and will likely just
write some scripts to manage my RAWs by hand. So far, I've just been lazy.

------
hashtree
As a, hopefully useful to someone, aside you can use icloud shared photo
streams for nearly unlimited storage of casual photos/videos. You are limited
to 5000, per stream. You can have 100 streams total:
[http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT4858](http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT4858)
Be aware, there is some downsizing that occurs: [http://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT5902](http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT5902) (see: `Which photo and video
formats and sizes does iCloud Photo Sharing support?`)

Works nicely to get the most of your iOS device storage, share with family,
mild private social interactions (e.g. commenting), OSX integration (e.g. you
can have one central repo for wallpapers for all devices), etc.

------
gutnor
Seems like all the big storage provider are bundling up feature. Integration
with all their product for Apple, Office 365 for Microsoft, now this for
Amazon.

I'm wondering if Dropbox has something in store ? Seems to me like they will
need something soon to justify their premium prices.

~~~
spindritf
They have a multiplatform client (including headless *nix) with a sync that
actually works. Somehow no one else does.

~~~
gordon_freeman
I think the only great thing remains about Dropbox is their awesome sync. But
think biggies like Google,MS,Apple,etc. will soon catch up with it with sync
service on par with Dropbox. Dropbox will need to come up with something to
justify its being.

------
s3r3nity
I tend to like Onedrive's photo storage & management -- and since I have
Office 365, it's unlimited as well.

Good move on Amazon's part to compete - not sure how Dropbox and the like will
keep up with this movement towards free unlimited storage.

------
swartkrans
This is interesting, but the features aren't comparable to Dropbox and this is
a sideshow for Amazon. I don't want to store my precious files at a place
where storing files isn't the primary focus of their business.

~~~
rscott
I think that Amazon AWS/S3 is significant reason to not call this a sideshow.

~~~
djcapelis
And glacier. I wonder if they've got a good way to guess how cold someone's
photos are likely to be.

------
mercwear
I am trying to determine if this can be used for video storage as well. The
documentation does not make that clear but it does state "rules" on video
uploads in terms of length, file format and size.

~~~
rada
The first thing that greeted me when I signed in (with my existing Prime
membership) was an upload window titled "Drag photos and videos here".

~~~
mercwear
Me too. But they do not state that video storage is free, only photo storage.

~~~
sitkack
Isn't a video just a sequence of photos ?

~~~
mercwear
In a sense. But a video file also stores things like sound which is one of the
things that make the file size larger.

------
gushie
Unless Amazon are now giving away Prime for free, it isn't free.

~~~
benguild
But it’s basically free considering that we all pay for Prime anyway. :)

~~~
Justsignedup
... I don't... _walks into a corner_

~~~
city41
I don't either. Although Prime is getting to the tipping point for me. Before
I didn't order enough packages or watch enough tv for it to be worth it.

------
thedangler
Canada or only US Prime subscribers.

~~~
acangiano
There is no excuse for not offering this to Canadian Prime subscribers. We get
absolutely nothing out of that subscription, but faster shipping. I will
cancel my Prime membership out of principle if they don't give us this one.

------
talltofu
I wonder how this impacts SmugMug that is hosted on AWS.

------
amelius
I just hope they don't make this public by default. I once made a wish-list on
amazon, and it turned out to be public without me knowing it :S

~~~
geekam
I had the same experience and I hated it. Although, a friend sent a book to me
from that list on my birthday but overall it is a disconcerting experience.

------
PStamatiou
Related RFS: Storage for Photographers [http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-
photographers/](http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-photographers/)

This doesn't quite meet my needs yet without a decent Mac uploader client but
I'll be keeping an eye on it. I have about a TB or so of RAWs and videos in
Glacier right now.

------
berberous
Awesome. I have no interest in using this, but the more pressure on Apple /
Dropbox to up their storage quotas, the better.

~~~
rev_bird
Honestly, I'd rather Dropbox keep its 1TB plan and make it cheaper. I pay
$9.99 a month for it and use it pretty much only for photo storage; it will be
years before I fill it up even halfway.

~~~
jkmcf
Just don't delete any local files because they don't remain in Dropbox.
Crashplan will keep locally deleted files forever. Backblaze only keeps them
for 30 days, and Dropbox removes them immediately (you can access them for 30
days via deleted file history, 1yr if you pony up more cash, but the business
plan keeps them indefinitely)

I agree with wanting the 1TB option to be cheaper, but I'm finding fewer uses
for Dropbox unless I switch to the business plan, which doesn't make sense.
However for a family, you get 5 users for 15/mo and unlimited space. I'm still
trying to figure out the downside to the business plan.

------
uvexdme
I had thousands of pics so I wrote an ugly but effective python script to copy
all the jpg files recursively and rename them in one single folder to upload.
feel free to check it out!

[https://github.com/zork3/copyandchangeJPG/tree/master](https://github.com/zork3/copyandchangeJPG/tree/master)

------
legohead
does Amazon have 2 factor auth? considering the recent iCloud debacle, this
would seem like a smart move. I see MFA [1] for AWS accounts, but not sure if
that rolls over to the regular login as well.

[1]
[http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/](http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/)

~~~
Chevalier
This is a really big deal. I had started uploading photos before I searched
for two-factor authentication... and immediately stopped when I realized it's
not available.

You would have to be an idiot to upload your photos to a service with nothing
more secure than a password. And Amazon is more than just photos -- it's
addresses, credit cards, purchase histories, subscriptions...

Amazon, offer TFA asap please!

------
ericcholis
It's unlikely that I'd use this as my only means of photo storage. I will,
however, use it to supplement iCloud and Backblaze.

Yes, there should be some underlying universal API for data storage like this.
But, in the meantime, I feel that tying myself to a single provider might bite
me in the ass.

------
egeozcan
I'm not 100% sure and didn't test it through but it seems to work with an
Amazon.de Prime membership as well[1]. Usually these services arrive later.

[1]: [http://i.imgur.com/s4NwAs1.png](http://i.imgur.com/s4NwAs1.png)

edit: False alarm, seems to be limited to 10GB.

~~~
3JPLW
In the EULA, they note: _" The Service is offered in the United States. We may
restrict access from other locations."_

------
tsemple
Unlike Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft, OneDrive doesn't seem to sync a
folder on my PC. You have to manually drag files and folders to upload them.
But free (I already have Prime) is a good price to backup my 500GB of photos.

~~~
Fastidious
Are you saying that the Amazon Cloud Drive client is allowing to access files
on the cloud, that are not synchronized to your machine? If that is the case,
this is a first, and it is great to hear!

------
markpundmann
I wonder how long it will be until amazon gets brought up for abusing their
market power:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_bundling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_bundling)

------
warble
Hmm. No way to work with the files directly, no organization tools, seems like
just a pile of files which doesn't help me much. Maybe it's because I'm in
linux and can't use their desktop client.

~~~
warble
My bad, I didn't see that you can put things in folders at least.

------
shittyanalogy
All I want is cheap shipping.

------
Someone1234
Legitimate question: I wonder what their definition of a "photo" is? For
example do they support RAW files? Or is it only JPG/PNG? On that subject I
wonder if even BMP is supported.

~~~
alexgaribay
For photos:

.bmp .gif .jpeg .jpg .png .raw .tif .tiff

For videos:

.mp4 (including mov, 3gp, m4v) .avi (including divx) .mts (mpeg transport
stream) .mpg (mpeg program stream) .asf/.wmv .flv .ogg

The restrictions can be found at
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201634590)

~~~
knd775
Do they have a good way to stream videos that you upload? If so, I may just
upload all of my movies and use it like a plex server.

~~~
angrybits
I was hoping the same thing, but the max length on a video is 20 minutes.
Drats, foiled again!

------
PhasmaFelis
So how long until someone figures out how to encode arbitrary binaries as a
series of JPGs and implements a general-purpose, unlimited-size cloud drive on
top of this?

------
EZ-E
Is this really "unlimited" ?

What happens if I script n VPS servers with 10Mbps upload speed to generate
random images and upload them to the service continuously ?

~~~
ghshephard
I think you know what happens.

------
zyxley
Does anyone know if this preserves Mac extended file attributes (which contain
tags, etc)? Dropbox does, which is pretty nice.

------
Fastidious
Amazon Cloud Drive, is it similar to Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud, in the
way it synchronizes data?

------
Corrado
I wish this would integrate with Apple iPhoto or the upcoming Photos app. My
goal is to have all my photos locally stored on my iMac so that I can create
slideshows, burn CDs, edit photos, etc. but I also want them securely stored
off-site. That's the best of both worlds.

------
davidw
What happens when you let prime lapse or forget or whatever?

~~~
misaelm
From their help page:

 _If you exceed the limit of your current storage plan, you won’t be able to
upload additional content but you 'll still be able to view, download and
delete your files, photos, and personal videos for at least three months.

During this time you can: ...Renew or sign-up for Amazon Prime to enjoy the
Prime Photos benefit..._

------
nolite
What happens to the photos when you stop paying for Prime?

------
arenaninja
<rant> ...and still no Amazon Instant Video on android tablets, only phone.
But now that DMA is on android I can stop waiting and say goodbye to Amazon
</rant>

------
benguild
Is RAW supported?

~~~
rickyc091
Yep, it's supported, but it's not necessarily easy to upload the files.

You can only use a mobile app or the web interface to drag and drop files...

~~~
christoph
This was going to be my question. It says it supports .RAW, but does that mean
it supports RAW files in general (i.e. CR2, ARW, NEF, etc.)?

If so, this is a huge thing for me. I've been looking for somewhere to back up
2TB of RAW files for a long time, but there's nothing out there that's
affordable/trustworthy enough that i've found.

~~~
amalag
I was going to buy this:
[https://www.zoolz.com/Zoolz_Home](https://www.zoolz.com/Zoolz_Home) but if
Amazon can support .DNG files it is easier.

------
bengali3
one more way to lock in that recurring Prime revenue :)

~~~
crazyjayd
I am actually ok with it. As a house hold, we have one prime account, then we
do the prime family share. So now everyone has unlimited storage in the house.
Nice.

~~~
bengali3
Interesting, I wasn't aware of the prime family share. thanks!

