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Comment by JorgeGT | Hacker News Reader

I'm giving Amazon Photos a try, since they offer unlimited high quality storage with Prime. I will appreciate if someone shares their opinion about this service.

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“Unlimited”, until it is limited. Amazon already bait-and-switched on unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive storage. Microsoft, too, on OneDrive, before Amazon. Now Google. What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?

> What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?

Because Amazon has an incentive to keep me as a Prime customer (I'll buy more crap on Amazon). Most people don't pay Google a single cent.

So it's not that I trust Amazon, it's that the economic model for Amazon including unlimited storage in my Prime membership makes sense.

(Note: I wouldn't bet on Amazon staying unlimited for the next 50 years, just providing the counter-argument.)

They had an incentive to keep me as an Amazon Cloud Drive customer, too, until they decided they didn’t if I stored more than 1TB. So I canceled.

In the case of Prime I doubt a non-negligible percentage of Prime customers would cancel over losing unlimited storage, so the incentive to keep it unlimited is even smaller.

I wouldn't count on it considering they unbundled ad free twitch from prime 2 years ago [0].

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17761760/twitch-prime-tur...

Oh, nothing. But until they do, why pay Google, if I already pay Prime?

Have used it but this sounds a lot like kicking the can down the road. Don’t be surprised if/when Amazon does the same thing and/or just lets photos Languish.

I encourage a self-hosted solution with backups. There are many, some super easy for non-tech folk to use (synology for example)

I am indeed self-hosting, but just a Raspberry Pi+HD. The Google/Amazon Photos is the backup/convenience. Since I want off-site backups in case something happens in my apartment, when/if Amazon goes this road I'll probably rent some general purpose storage in the cloud.

Check out backblaze. Crazy cheap for backups (0.005/GB/month or so IIRC) and you can easily encrypt before doing so to maintain privacy.

Oh, I have Amazon Prime and didn't know Amazon Photos existed!

Is it a PITA to switch from Google Photos, or is it just a case of installing an Amazon Photos app and enabling sync?

It's a lot nicer importing and exporting photos with Amazon Prime Photos. Google Takeout is a nightmare to use.

I've been using it for a few weeks already. tldr: It's slightly worse than Google photos in most respects and quite a bit worse for albums.

* The AI is fine, although not as good as Google's.

* Albums are far less featureful. The shared link doesn't even show the album title. You can't add text or locations like you can on Gphotos. This makes trip albums less good IMO.

* Scrolling and UI seem faster, although I have far fewer photos.

* Desktop upload is nice for people who have non-smartphone cameras

* Albums list can be sorted by Date Created or Name. GPhotos default sort is by the date of the most recent photo. * Adding and removing from albums seems slower, but is also async, so /shrug

* Selecting multiple photos is much harder- Google allows a Press, hold, swipe gesture to select multiple photos. Amzn doesn't have that on the app. On web, they do have shift+Click, though.

* Different photo layouts is nice

* The shared photo screen is very aggressively in your face about advertising amazon photos. GPhotos has no ads.

* AFAICT, Amzn does not share the accounts/names of signed-in people who access shared content. Gphotos leaks this info to anyone who views the shared content. It's one of my main problems with GPhotos.

I have not really tested the "Groups" feature (which seems to be the equivalent of shared albums).

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