Amazon Prime Members’ Newest Benefit Is Free, Unlimited Photo Storage | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Prime Members’ Newest Benefit Is Free, Unlimited Photo Storage

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197 pointsnikunjk217 comments

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.

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

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

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) operates no differently than `rsync` would.

how/why?

They are completely unrelated products, except for branding.

Yeah, I know. Sigh.

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.

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.

I think the rationale was some kind of Sharepoint tagging abomination.

because onedrive for business runs on top of SharePoint document libraries and well.. they can do some "interesting" things to files.

Same with OneNote. It has a lot of great features... and a metrick fuckload of legacy creepy crawlies under the hood.

IIRC only OneDrive for Business (née SharePoint) did that, not the OneDrive consumers use.

iCloud.

For anyone interested, on iCloud Photo Library beta:

Downloaded off device that image was taken with via Image Capture

  3942cf85f43282ece05ee01ef82f3b245e1638e6  IMG_2273.JPG

Downloaded via iCloud.com/photos

  0271267eb3fe02a27398e20e285cf14a26333510  IMG_2273.JPG

But probably the better test will be to see how files differ between iOS devices, and the Mac Photos.app when that is released.

...

Running this through exiftool, the image downloaded via icloud.com/photos has the following EXIF stripped which is the likely cause of the above change:

  GPS Latitude Ref          
  GPS Longitude Ref         
  GPS Altitude Ref          
  GPS Time Stamp            
  GPS Speed Ref             
  GPS Speed                 
  GPS Img Direction Ref     
  GPS Img Direction         
  GPS Dest Bearing Ref      
  GPS Dest Bearing          
  GPS Date Stamp            
  GPS Altitude  
  GPS Date/Time 
  GPS Latitude  
  GPS Longitude 
  GPS Position

Try stripping locally and see if the checksum matches.

Oddly enough, I tried but was unsuccessful:

  exiftool -gps:all= IMG_2273.JPG

ended up changing the Thumbnail Offset within that file, which is a protected EXIF item that I don't know how to change.

.NEF files are not an included extension and are not included in the unlimited storage.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

I uploaded a .NEF and in the usage panel it shows I'm using 0 bytes of my 5GB and 1 photo of my unlimited photo storage.

I have nothing else on my cloud drive.

While not on that list, it seems raw files are supported

Interesting. I emailed Amazon and received this reply:

Currently the unlimited photo storage benefit includes most major image file types: JPEG, GIF, (both animated and non-animated), most common TIFFs, RAW, PNG, and BMP.

This means at this time the .nef, .rw2 and .orf will be considered as unsupported format and will count against cloud drive storage limit.

For more information about Cloud Drive Photos & Videos file requirements, go to:

https://www.amazon.com/help/clouddrive/photos/filerequiremen...

I've forwarded your comments as feedback to our Amazon Cloud Drive team that you want .NEF file type images to be included in the unlimited photo storage benefit so that they aren't counted against your Cloud Storage quota. We're adding more file types to the unlimited photo storage feature, and file types not compatible now may become compatible in the future.

I just looked at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2... and the "Note" mentions NEF as a supported format. I am still seeing errors "File size larger than remaining quote" when I try to upload NEF files, but JPG works fine. Not sure what the disconnect is.

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?

That is quite cynical. Perhaps they want to compete against Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google for users wanting storage.

It already does, it's called Cloud Drive (and Zocalo). They might still end up snagging some users with this, but that doesn't take away from the possibility that they're using the info for advertising.

The terms of how they use the photos in the EULA seem rather reasonable at first glance: "We may use, access, and retain Your Files in order to provide the Service to you and enforce the terms of the Agreement, and you give us all permissions we need to do so. These permissions include, for example, the rights to copy Your Files for backup purposes, modify Your Files to enable access in different formats, use information about Your Files to organize them on your behalf, and access Your Files to provide technical support."

BUT: then they tack on "Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice." In the Privacy Notice, they state that any information you give Amazon in any way may be used "for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future shopping for you, improving our stores…" Not sure how this interfaces with the Cloud EULA, but it seems to do the opposite of "respecting your privacy."

I'd assume that's exactly what they'll do. They've already demonstrated that they have the technology:

https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-p...

Interesting that you say that given the fact that CIA has just become a client of Amazon's cloud.

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.

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

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.

If, in some future year, you can no longer afford this luxury you might have to cancel your subscription.

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.

does this remind anyone else of cable network bundling? which is now going through a decoupling of its own.

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?

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);

> 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.

What if they need to price hike the service again? Also losing tax incentives in many states starts to swing the value proposition, but features like this will raise it.

Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.

While I agree with you 100% I think that this isn't a very good argument against lock-in. i.e what if Amazon pricing model changes making it not cost effective, or what if they start limiting their services or what if a better service crops up and Amazon cannot compete etc...

Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.

There's always the possibility that you won't necessarily always want to direct so much of your shopping on Amazon as to recoup that Prime cost. A new player may enter or a current one change such that price, selection, service, etc. makes it more compelling to direct more of your commerce through them. There is also the possibility that Amazon itself changes to be less attractive as a commerce option.

This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.

I canceled my Prime Subscription.

- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price

- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping

Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.

Since we share it across my family, sure we would likely keep the $100/yr, even on the few purchases a month we make. I have occasionally used Prime video, but wouldn't shed a tear if we had to give it up. I can't name a single other thing I would consistently use from Prime.

More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.

If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).

Don't forget that shipping is still free if you are willing to batch your purchases so that they total at least $35. Amazon also ding non-prime members on shipping speed.

Not everybody is you. We let our Prime subscription lapse as we don't buy enough stuff from Amazon to justify it. This photos offering has my wife reconsidering rather strongly.

This photo service also might play well with Fire tablets.

You're not being cynical. That's exactly what they will do and much more. I would only upload files that you don't mind sharing with your spouse, kids, and friends. And that goes for any cloud services, not just Amazon.

Not least because the pictures are available on the Fire TV, so if you plug in a Fire TV in the living room you better not have any pictures in your Amazon Cloud Drive that you don't want anyone that gets to use your Fire TV to see.

Encrypt your images. If they don't accept the encrypted data, represent the encrypted data as RGB color values in BMP format (forget about lossless compression, it won't make sense on an encrypted data stream; use lossy compression before encrypting instead).

This would be a great app to have

And a clever browser plugin or something to decode it seamlessesly

in case anyone missed it, they have this already. see firefly: http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/amazons-fire-phone-introduc...

I believe this is the same tech in their latest version of the barcode reader in their iOS app too.

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?

Having photos on my own external hard drive is an enormous liability. Even ignoring the risk of a fire / theft / loss (not to mention the hassle itself of backing them up locally), drives fail.

> have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere

I would say instead you have an enormous uploading task ahead of you to move 2 Tb of photos from your HDD into the cloud somewhere.

Plus, the main reason I have photos is to share them with other people. If I'm going to end up uploading them somewhere else, it's just easier.

I know opinions differ on privacy, but I honestly could not care less who sees my vacation photos.

The main advantages are:

  - the auto-backup apps on the different platforms
  - the web interface for online browsing and sharing.
  - not having to worry about hard drive failures.

> 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.

I do this (home backups), but I also value having offsite backups.

I don't see Prime photos as a reason to signup for Prime by itself, but hell, as a longtime Prime member who has signed up just for shipping, I'm obviously very happy with how they've continued to role out perks.

I don't even plan to use Photos (OS X isn't supported yet, anyway), but I love the demonstration of their commitment to Prime members. More than anything, that's where I think things like this are valuable.

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.

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

That's a rather strong statement to make.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/dram-error-rates-nightmare...

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 [2]http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

You're comparing a redundant geographically-separated allways-available service with a hard drive that can fail/burn/get stolen.

And if you don't stay with Prime, you just fall back to Amazon Cloud Drive. Their pricing isn't amazing, but not horrible either. $25/year for 50GB.

For comparison, S3 redundant storage is $18/year for 50GB.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/pricing/ref=cd_home_navpri...

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

If you actually want to do this, get a RAID 1 NAS like the Synology Diskstation 214 or 214+, stuff a couple 4TB drives into it, and then additionally set it to periodically auto-backup the valuable bits to Amazon Glacier.

This ends up being a good bit more expensive, but you'll actually have your photos in 10 years instead of having just a dead hard drive.

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.

There are several JavaScript projects that aim to let you connect your own storage from a varity of locations. They are still pretty early on in development, though.

1. http://remotestorage.io/

2. http://cloud-rail.com/

3. https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS

Disclosure: I maintain byoFS.

Well it's called Remote Storage [1] but I guess we can't expect companies like Google, Apple, Amazon or DropBox to actually embrace that, isnt it?

[1] http://remotestorage.io/

It's not a standardized API but you can use Lightroom plug-ins such as jfriedl's to "publish" to a variety of different sites. That said, this approach is more oriented toward uploading a curated and edited subset than your photos in bulk.

On that topic, I suppose that I'm going to have to think about how much curation I should do for the multimedia that I keep at all. I'm backing up about 1.5TB to cloud storage and that's at or over the limit of what I really have the network bandwidth to reasonably deal with. And I know that most of what's backed up could be easily deleted--but it would take time to do that curation.

I was considering going after this as well, as none of the cloud storage providers would build an intuitive app to offer multiple backends that let you move away from their own.

A small budget for a v1 desktop & mobile app that gracefully removed all this fuzziness could disrupt this 'store your photos here!' war between giants, using their own cloud file storage products. However that's when the transfer rates become switching costs...

But I do believe photo storage is worth a premium over file storage specifically: Photos are of family; Family is cherished; some people would run into burning buildings to save family photo albums...

is now the time?

Don't :). [1][2][3]

[1] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

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

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

Awesome! Congratulations! Thank you for sharing your journey. How has it worked out going for business customers?

Let me know if/when you want to go back to consumers. A lot has changed in 4 years and I think you hit the nail on the head with some of your previous comments. In the current environment, many people are comparing the next hard drive purchase vs cloud storage purchase. I don't believe that was the case 1 year ago.

That was before the iOS 'Your cloud storage is full' alert started scaring mothers and grandmothers everywhere in thinking their photos will be gone forever!.

That was before the (..possible) facebook decline (but my photos are there!!)

you've got a headstart on me, but features I want:

Let me be an Admin and control which cloud provider i'm going to pay for. I'll set up the vendor accounts as needed/recommended by your newsletter.

Let my Wife, Mother, Father, Mother-in-law do the uploading and sharing - seamlessly as they would with their other apps as I change hosting providers behind the scenes for them as I feel the need. the most basic of UI needed for them. - think an app they could launch to see 'All Backed-up' or 'Backing up now'

I wouldn't prioritize cropping, tagging, 'liking', emailing, sharing, communicating, friending, etc

Best of luck!

i loved the idea, but stopped using it around the time of the name change - for some reason the login stopped working for me in Opera, and that was enough friction for me to give up on it

Sorry you had troubles logging in. But thanks for using it.

To your point, the idea is/was great but if it wasn't good enough that you stopped using it because of a login issue that emphasizes my point.

I agree it's a great idea and other have had it before me and obviously still continue today. I don't believe it's something you can scale a large business from.

It's the way to boost money-losing vendor-specific "client" solutions.

Expect other cloud providers to follow suit:

"Use our unlimited (and slow) storage if you'll sign up to use our crappy (device|app|service)".

Don't expect:

"Use our unlimited storage for (free|low fee) from anywhere".

There are S3 and Swift (OpenStack storage) which can be used through standardized APIs. Storage in both standards is offered by many independent providers.

ExpanDrive works across many cloud providers and mounts them as a volume (which makes it compatible with nearly any Windows or Mac app):

http://www.expandrive.com/

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...

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

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

[4] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

edit: added link #4

Picturelife lets you specify your own S3 backing and lets you use their interface.

And I'm feeling really bad for picturelife right now.

I have one issue with Picturelife: it doesn't adhere to folder structure. A more minor one would be folder monitoring on iOS, but I can set something up with IFTTT to work around that.

Aside from that the service is wonderful and I'm really coming around to it. I want them to succeed and I hope they do.

ARQ on OS X backs up your data to AWS S3|Glacier or Google: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

I'm not affiliated with the developer, just a big fan.

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

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

What are you looking for?

As a new dad living away from my family, here's what I want:

1. cheap storage. I'm willing to pay $5 for 100GB.

2. don't muck around with my pictures. I have a nice camera.

3. don't copy all of the pictures on my account to all my devices, I'm trying to free up storage, not consume it.

4. let me setup a slideshow on my TV easily. I have (multiple) game consoles hooked up (that have web browsers). I have a Chromecast. Music + pictures = instant emotional win! Just let me pick an album "start slideshow" and put on some cheesy music automatically.

5. Let me easily share albums with family/friends, and let them access the pictures easily

Right now Picasa + Google Plus is the closest. The one thing is that there is no good way to get a slideshow going on my TV. This is actually a big deal to me. I have a Chromecast and all the major game consoles connected to my TV - and there's still no good solution. OneDrive on Xbox One gets pretty close for TV slideshows, but then I have to upload an album specifically to OneDrive - which actually isn't too bad. But it's still cumbersome to get a slideshow with music going and because Xbox One doesn't do background music I have 1/4 of the screen taken up:

* load up music app

* find something to fit the "mood" which is annoying to do on Xbox Music

* go to one drive

* navigate to album

* start slideshow

* snap xbox music

They just released Chromecast Backdrop, https://www.google.com/chromecast/backdrop/

Yup, I've been using that - but it's not really a slideshow. Each picture is visible for 20+ seconds, and there's no music. I haven't tested if you play music that the backdrop is still visible though.

Google+ and Chromecast are like 85% of the way there. I just want to open up the Google+ app on my phone, go to an album and "cast slideshow" and have that be a great experience. Right now it's horrible.

> I'm willing to pay $5 for 100GB.

Well there's the issue. S3 rates are $3 for 100GB, which leaves $2/mo to provide the value-added services you enumerate.

You'd need 5k monthly subscribers just to hire 1 engineer.

If someone were providing this service at scale they'd get better pricing that $3 for 100GB. But you're somewhat right that the margins here are pretty thin - which is probably why the people that are providing the infrastructure are also providing the service (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). The margins are going to be higher for them, so it's going to be very hard for a startup to compete.

Have you looked into Picturelife? Their pricing is competitive and it has easy album sharing.

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.

> 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.

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.

To add one additional bit of supporting evidence, Snapfish (owned by HP) is currently offering a promotion for users of their mobile app (iOS & Android): 100 free prints per month for a year. Yes, 1200 free prints, all from your phone or tablet, as long as you store them at Snapfish.

http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/storepage/storePageId=page-...

Only $0.99/print shipping, what a deal.

http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/helppricing

> 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?

Things like geo data, people, dresses can all be detected and used to suggest various products.

I wonder how much effort it would be to subject the images to some simple and reversible transform to foil that sort of thing. (e.g., extract every odd-numbered pixel to its own layer, rotate it by 180 degrees, and merge.)

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.

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

And Dropbox receives Microsoft Office integration....

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.

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.

> $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.

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).

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.

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.

Exactly - their tactics failed with me, as I cancelled my prime membership due to having Netflix already and not wanting to be force fed amazon's instant video for a hefty increase in the annual subscription price.

$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.

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.

Does CrashPlan+ have a mobile app to auto upload photos and such?

Nope, their mobile app is used as a file manager for your backups.

Crashplan has a desktop app that backs up your photos indefinitely though. It backups your external devices as well, been using them for years and I can't tell you how many times it's saved me.

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.

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

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?

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.

Well I guess I am not listing my work flow clearly.

Backup: Comp #1 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #2 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #6 (Out of State Mother Inlaws (Selected) -> HomeNAS

Work Flow Any Comp working on files from NAS (Not local)

That actually just confuses me more.

From my last experience with CrashPlan, it'd take me a year to upload my photos.

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.

Bitcasa was originally billed as unlimited cloud storage, but I believe they've moved to having really large tiers now instead.

> 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)

What happens if you drop your Prime membership?

Great question for such an important lock-in mechanism. Perhaps a 30-day grace period? No media release so far that I can find references the conditions to keep data beyond the free 5GB Cloud Drive limit.

There is an option to "Download All Files".

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?

While it doesn't appear to be easily done through the UI, I'm sure contacting Amazon support will get you all of your files back.

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)

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?

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/04/three-alternatives-ubuntu...

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

Copy has a command line client, and it's available for both Intel and ARM.

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...

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

I think you need the pro version to download them back.

Flickr Pro was depreciated a few months back. All Flickr users are able to download their originals now!

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.

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).

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.

Also Flickr does not have desktop client which you can use on your PC or Mac which was ultimately deal-breaker for me.

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 Be aware, there is some downsizing that occurs: 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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".

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

Isn't a video just a sequence of photos ?

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

Adding .jpg/similar to the end of the filename normally allows you to store about anything small enough, I found. (I didn't check here though.)

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

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

... I don't... walks into a corner

Hey, check this guy out! He waits 5 business days for packages!

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.

The problem comes when they raise the price because of all the "added value". And I just want the "free" shipping.

It's a value add to make it feel better when you realize the Prime price is often the price + shipping.

Prime is reaching a primarily-digital-services point that I half-expect them to split-off the free-shipping 'benefit' into another package, or quietly drop it.

Actually I wish they would, so that I could check-out physical orders twice as fast without the tedium of deselecting the defaulted 'Yes give me the 30-day Prime trial!' checkboxes. It is quite odious how much upselling they now load into the checkout process.

Canada or only US Prime subscribers.

I even checked, fully knowing what the answer was going to be.

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.

Only US Prime subscribers. We don't get digital benefits with our prime membership in Canada yet.

Source: Contacted Amazon.ca

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

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

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.

Related RFS: 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.

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

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.

Dropbox would lose money on you if you used the whole TB. The whole business plan replies on people not using their whole quotas.

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.

I want to see pressure to provide a better photo service. (API's, organizational tools, sharing, privacy controls,etc) All we are getting is a race to the bottom and worse services.

You might be interested in Smugmug. They hit all of those and have a simple and affordable pricing model. $40/yr unlimited storage. No gimmicks. Really good privacy controls.

just did a quick look. I evaluated Smugmug a few years ago, but decided it didn't quite meet my needs. But it looks like i should give the service a serious review again.

And I see that they have support for RSS and other feeds which might work for some of the integrations I want to do.

+1 for Smugmug. Satisfied customer.

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

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/

It does not.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

All I want is cheap shipping.

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.

I wonder what the definition of "unlimited" is?

That should be quite simple to test. Just generate a bunch of random images and start uploading. Let us know when they ban you, and declare you the enemy of the state.

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...

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.

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

Beyond filetype, they limit videos to under 20 minutes, so probably won't be replacing Plex anytime soon.

I can't seem to find anywhere whether they include free video storage as well. I realize there are limitation on video size, but I have thousands of short videos that fit their limitations.

Thousands of short videos, eh? ;)

Indeed! I work on a mobile app, well, a whole system really, that helps compose short videos into one larger video.

It's actually somewhat unclear. They say that they support ".raw" files, but that suffix is only used for raw files from Kyocera Contax and Panasonic cameras. They specifically don't list .NEF (Nikon), .CR2 / .CRW (Canon), or .DNG (the "standardized" raw file format).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

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?

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 ?

I think you know what happens.

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

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

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.

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

They charge you for the cloud storage?

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...

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

<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>

Is RAW supported?

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...

Is that true? Visiting the site [0] there is a sections that says:

   Desktop - Install the Cloud Drive application for PC to add photos from your computer. Download for PC.

It does warn though that:

   We're currently working on a Cloud Drive application for Mac.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos

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.

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

Would be curious to hear if they're using some sort of authentication for the client (ie. private key) as a way to bottleneck that. Would suck to have to relay everything through a smartphone for now... but there's always a better way.

I believe it's either phone OR drag/drop into a browser from a desktop, so just no client side Amazon app at the moment, maybe to keep everyone from installing it and setting it to backup everything on the initial launch.

EDIT: Nevermind, I'm now reading your comment less as "only smartphone available" and more as "use the smart phone app as a proxy"

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

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.

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

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