Before you try it, you might be cautious of its data usage and the time required. And of course there may be a better way to do it. Prime Photos allows you to store an UNLIMITED amount of pictures on Amazon's cloud servers. One of the neat features is that when you download the app to your cell phone, when you take pictures with your cell phone, they will automatically be uploaded to Amazon storage.
You do have to be an Amazon Prime customer to use this service.
I'm always afraid of loosing all of my pictures after I've gotten them cleaned up and sorted the way I want so I can locate them again. I do have them loaded on my desktop, two laptops and a Seagate back-up unit, but if the house burns, I still loose them all. I'm in the process of loading them to a 3 Gig WD portable drive to put at a friends house.
I wanted to experiment with how it all works before I got too carried away so I decided to load just the pictures on my cell phone. I have a fair amount of pictures on the phone, and no, I can't tell you how many.
So I loaded the app and told the phone to upload the pictures on the cell phone. When at home my phone works on wireless from our router which only gets 10 meg service from our local ISP. It's only 10 meg because we're out about the maximum distance from our local wire center and they used lousy 16ga wire when they wired this area of town years ago.
Loading the cell phone pictures slowed our 10 meg internet service down so slow it was almost worthless. I found that internet on our desktops came to almost a stop while uploading the pictures.
I also have an ATT hotspot that's seldom used, so I turned it on and switched my cell phone to it. The hotspot of course monitors the amount of data used and it used slightly over 15.7 gigs of data and remember I did some of it over my home system already. AND, it took hours and hours to upload them from the hotspot but note that I only had two bars of service so a better connection may have gone faster, but it would have still used the same amount of data. So be aware if you're traveling and think about using your hotspot for both the data usage and the amount of time it could take.
I could not get my phone to upload the pictures when I took it off of WiFi and was just using my standard Verizon service. I would have expected this to work - does anyone know if I was doing something wrong? I'm using a Samsung Note 4 phone. While I wanted to see if Verizon would have worked, I wouldn't have used it to load all of the cell pictures because we only have 12 gigs of data to use per month on Verizon.
Once you have your backlog of pictures loaded, the few you take each day shouldn't take long and you'll just have to monitor your data usage. You can pause the uploading and just turn it on when you're at a place with free WiFi or use it at the end of the month when you have data left to use.
I now need to figure out if I can upload the pictures from my desktop to Amazon in the groupings / albums I have them so I don't have to resort all of them. My desktop operates on our WiFi also. While I don't have to worry about the amount of data used, I'll only do it at night so the system is available for normal usage.
And as a note, the DW's desktop is hardwired into the ISPs supplied router with CAT 5 cable and it also slowed down to almost unusable when I was uploading the pictures from my cell phone on WiFi that operates from the same ISP router.
An interesting feature is that each day Amazon will send you pictures that you took one year and maybe two years ago. It's neat to see where you were a year ago today. No idea how much data that's using.
In general I don't like anymore of my personal info out there on the net than necessary. My pictures are 99.9% scenery or my hunting pictures. I don't take selfies and I don't load pictures I'm in. I don't care if my scenery picture are on the cloud as they don't give away any personal info and anyone could have taken them.
Post if you've tried Amazon Photos yet and what your experience was. I think the service will work fine, it's just the amount of data and time it will take. Yes, I'm sure there are programs that will store my pictures in a smaller format and therefore will transfer quicker, but I don't want to mess with that since it's mostly beyond my ability and attention span - football is on......
Here are a couple of links I got from Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/pricinghttp://www.amazon.com/help/amazondriveIf you store your pictures on Amazon, you can access all of them on your cell phone or laptop as long as you have internet access.
Bill
Nodwell RN110 out moose hunting. 4-53 Detroit, Clark 5 spd, 40" wide tracks, 10:00x20 tires, 16,000# capacity, 22,000# weight. You know the mud is getting deep when it's coming in the doors.
