Amazon Photos: Photo & Video Reviews

When it works correctly, AmazonPhotos is great. After I sign it, it usually works for 3 or 4 days, then will be stuck "checking" for x-amount of pictures, never loads them and then I either have to sign out and sign back in or delete AmazonPhotos and download it again. Then when I login, it's stuck on the login page for about 12 hours, then is on a blank white page for about 12 hours, then everything is fine and it works for a few days before I have to repeat the process again. I have some photos that it has never backed up and it apparently never will because even when I tell it to upload them, it gets stuck and they still never backup. But... for free... and unlimited storage... I can't be too mad.
Update: AmazonPhotos has been working amazingly well, until iOS 14. Now every time I open AmazonPhotos it gives me the login screen, but I have to log out first or nothing happens. When I login, it acts like the first time I’ve ever used AmazonPhotos and tries to upload everything from my Photos. I have to reset my settings the way I want them and delete a bunch of pictures that have uploaded and been deleted previously.

I would like to be able to tag the people and just photos not under just where the people circle is because it doesn’t catch everyone in there I would like to be able to tag the people myself in photos, also it has automatically done a lot of duplicate photos so I have three and four of each photo in my photos I’m glad that I’m a prime member and it doesn’t charge me, and in the iPad app when I’m putting text on a photo and maybe I’ve done one or two it like will not save it so I have to start all over turn my iPad close AmazonPhotos or out and then try it again and it will take it I called about this and they told me to uninstall AmazonPhotos and reinstall AmazonPhotos I did that but I still have that problem on the iPad and on my desktop I was used to be able to put a photo frame with a color for Christmas red and green Halloween orange and now I cannot do that I’m sorry that they took that away I like that feature of putting a frame around my holiday photos

At this point AmazonPhotos is purely for storing photos, which it does excellently. If you’re a prime member looking to free up space on your phone, AmazonPhotos is for you. But in addition to storage, I like to organize my photos. The latest major update has made it very difficult to do that.

- First, the facial recognition has never been great. It’s always combined multiple family members into one. The plus of the old version was that I could manually override the person tag. Now, I’m stuck with whatever tag AmazonPhotos automatically assigns. This makes it difficult, as I like to make different albums for my individual children. Now my sons are lumped together under the same person tag and I can’t separate them.

- Second, the user interface is unfriendly. It’s difficult to find any feature that’s not looking at a picture or a memory. The search function is cool as long as I’m not looking for a specific person (see my first complaint). Overall, I like the new streamlined look, but a menu bar wouldn’t hurt.

In albums there should be a feature where you can change your most recent uploaded pictures to be at the top on the album. It used to be this way. It has changed. Now all my recent pictures are at the bottom in the albums I’ve created and its a pain to scroll down 200 pics all the way to the bottom to see if I added it to the album. Please change this feature or at least add a feature for date taken or uploaded within the albums created. I know there is a feature like this under all the pictures taken but not in the albums. Please add this feature. Also, I’ve noticed when I add an article that I have screen shotted with my phone and add it to my albums of saved articles, it uploads in the album backwards. I get the last page of the article 1st in the album instead of last. The first page is at the bottom, not at the top. This feature definitely needs to be changed.

As a photographer I love that this allows me to store high quality RAW files from the camera without having to pay for expensive cloud storage outside of my Prime membership!! Really awesome as other services do not store the full quality images. I also love the faces features and ability to search by what’s in the picture.

I edit most of my photos on iPad so its great as I can just import them from camera and back them up here and my hard drive.

There is ONE THING that is super annoying and should be fixed- the ability to multi select or select all. I dont want to back up every single item in my photos just the RAW photos and edited versions. So I have to manually select each photo which is so many when I do a shoot with 400 images for example. If I could hold and drag to multi-select or create albums in iPhone photos and choose “select all” it would make using AmazonPhotos a million times easier.

* Review updated

I started using AmazonPhotos after several days which were necessary to upload all the photos from my phone. There are definitely nice features. I like that AmazonPhotos offers you to look at the pics that were taken on the same day previous years.
My biggest disappointment, however, is that AmazonPhotos backs up pictures as soon as they are taken (if wi-fi is available) and doesn’t update them if they are being edited. I take quite a few pics a day and, at the end of it, I edit the best of them. If they were baked up some time earlier in the day, they remain unchanged.
I was hoping that Prime Photo could be a free (well, I pay for prime either way) substitute of iCloud, but, unfortunately, it can’t. As soon as I get a new phone, am I supposed to edit a couple thousand pics again?!

***
I haven’t really started using AmazonPhotos yet, but I’m already frustrated. I have lots of pictures on my phone - around 8 thousand. I know it takes time to copy/back them up, but not that much! AmazonPhotos was running a few hours at night and several hours in the morning, it managed to back up only a half! My phone barely works when it’s running and they want you to keep AmazonPhotos open for it to work faster which means I can’t use my phone at all. I stopped myself from deleting AmazonPhotos several times already. I hope in a few days it’s gonna download all the pics so I could finally check out all the features.

Update previous review:
AmazonPhotos has undergone several revisions over the last couple of years and had improved greatly. Fantastic app!

Original review:
AmazonPhotos works well for photos and videos taken after AmazonPhotos is downloaded, but photos and videos taken before sometimes don't show the correct date. And there's no way to move the photo to the correct order or edit the date taken. I actually downloaded software to edit the "created" and "modified" dates to the files before uploading, but this had no effect. Also, some of the videos got stuck when uploading for a few days when I initially synced my phone.

I have spent so much time having to correct an app flaw: normally, you ho through a sequence of screens to complete orders. HOWEVER, amazon’s app does this frequent bounce back before an oder is complete, and it returns you to the home page. Then, you are not sure if the order goes through. I have had to get credited 3x for double orders. And even if you contact them one minute after receiving confirmation of an order to cancel (I receive two separate Discover charge texts), they will say “Sorry we are unable to cancel the order.” Then, you have to go through the hoops of a refund and of explaining to recipients why they are getting two sets of the same photos. I know it is easy to blame app user, but each time it is amazon’s app jumping out of a sequence mid order. Other times, you’ll get a death spin of it uploading or processing, and I have had to turn off and back on my phone to kill it. iPhone issue? Both phone and app are up to date btw

I’ve only use AmazonPhotos literally like 15 minutes and I am so furious with AmazonPhotos. You’d think something with great ratings will be good but I am so disappointed. Let me tell you why.

1st as I was trying to upload photo for my Echo Show, AmazonPhotos decided it had to notify me through mid selection that it needed to update.. I lost my progress of selecting 30 photos.. okay no biggie I can reselect it.

After it did what it did, I tried to reselect the same photo.. well where is the upload section? It’s hidden in settings.. why is this the location for such an important function? I had to google where it was FYI.

Upon finding the upload section, I can’t access my favorites... at this point I’m starting to pull my hair. Desperately trying to get my favorites folder to show up, I close AmazonPhotos , delete some folders in my photos app, and kept trying to find a solution. To my surprise.. nothing worked.

At this point I am desperate to add photos to my echo show because I have a party to host.. so here I am selecting photos with over 11k photos without a way to narrow it down...

But the last thing, the very last thing that is making me frustrated.. is how much the scrolling jumps.. I’d be scrolling then all the sudden it jumps all the way down near below the center of photos.. this happened at least 4 times, until I need to write this review. I’m done with AmazonPhotos. Complete disappointment. ughhh I am so frustrated..

So far, it is difficult for me to properly rate AmazonPhotos . I have been trying to back my photos up for a couple of days. I have just over 12,000. I left AmazonPhotos open overnight last night and woke up with 491 photos remaining to back up. I needed to send a quick text message, so I switched over to messaging, sent my message and promptly returned to the photo app. The count went back up to over 12,000 and AmazonPhotos now is “checking for backup”, counting down in the same fashion as when I started the process last night. As an added service to something I already pay for (Prime), it’s tough to complain but it isn’t doing what I need it to yet, so I need to maintain middle ground until I have some indication that it will ever back up my photos. It doesn’t do any background uploading, wifi or not, and I can’t just leave AmazonPhotos open all day. Each time I go back into it now, it starts over.

It seems like a good way to store photos! Pretty straight forward and easy to navigate/access photos after they have been backed up. A few minor things are a pain, like when adding photos to an album, it doesn’t keep them marked as part of that album. So if you go back into all photos to add more to the album, there’s no way to tell which ones have already been added. The albums also aren’t organized by date of the photos in the album, they are organized by when the album was created, which isn’t very helpful. I’d prefer them to be organized chronologically. I only started using it a few days ago so maybe there’s a work-around that I haven’t discovered yet...all in all, a decent way to store photos.

One thing would make this a 5 star review: Would love it if the picture was removed from the main photos page when you add it to an album. OR at least, AmazonPhotos needs to clearly show if the picture has been added to an album. Currently, there is no way to know which pictures I have placed in albums. This is very annoying when you have a thousand pictures to organize.

Otherwise, love the unlimited storage of the ORIGINAL PICTURE SIZE with Prime membership!!! It’s TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE! I’m just waiting for them to take that away (please don’t take it away). Was using paid Dropbox, but I don’t have enough room to upload at original pic size (although Dropbox gives you a lot of storage, pictures are large!). This is a wonderful membership perk and well worth it!

I have been in limbo since the beginning of April waiting to upgrade my video storage. The message I received stated that I had to wait until April 28 for my current subscription to run out and then I had to cancel and upgrade to the video storage tier that I need. I waited and waited and on April 28, my useless subscription finally expired. But I couldn’t upgrade my video storage! I thought I should give it a day. Still can’t upgrade my video storage. I tried to contact app support but it just takes you to a discussion forum. The information there states that you can cancel early and receive a prorated difference (would have been nice if your in-app prompt shared that info). It also walks you through upgrading your video storage. However, I still do not have the option anywhere in-app, via Web browser or Drive to upgrade my video storage as I have been trying to do now for weeks. So frustrating!

I have lots of photos and videos. It took a week to upload the pics and then most of the videos. I had 50 videos left that needed uploading yesterday so I wanted to upgrade beyond the $1.99/mo option since I already signed up for that. It says I need to upgrade to fit more but there is no way to do it no matter where I click. There were only 50 items left that needed uploading and then last night it all of a sudden changed back to needing to upload over 18,000 items. Is that going to take another week? It is frustrating because I planned on buying a new phone today so I wanted to delete the pics and videos from my phone to start fresh but now I don’t trust that I will have all my pics and videos saved.

I shoot a lot of pictures so I need a lot of back up space. The unlimited space provided by AmazonPhotos provides an additional piece of mind for all my shots.

The interface is a bit clunky and is a major memory hog.

The other issue I have encountered is that it is no longer recognizing my canon raw files after processing them through Lightroom (CR2 files). The problem just started in the last month so I am not sure the issue. However this would be a major negative if it can’t store canon raw files.

It’s by no means perfect. The information and instruction on use is lacking which in my case lead to a major error. In one case, I eliminated a folder on prime, only to discover that that action also deleted the original file on the hard drive. Luckily I had the raw files still on the memory card.

In summary, if you are a prime member, you should absolutely use it. It’s another way to back up your pics at no cost.

However if I had to pay for the service, I don’t think I would, at least not with current functionality.

In conclusion, I feel like an ingrate complaining about a free service that I am using! From a value perspective, I rate it 4 out of 5.

Ok, not literally, however, I had tried and failed with other options like iCloud, portable storage drives, and external flash drives. The first costs money, and could not handle multiple users, the second did not work with my phone, and the third died and may or may not be recoverable. Get AmazonPhotos before your current phone dies and takes your photos with it! Video storage is limited, but if you take lots of videos, you can pay to upgrade to a bigger plan. I think about the people who have lost everything in the recent wildfires. If they had AmazonPhotos, at least they would be able to reprint family photos later.

This is the best app I’ve ever used to backup my photos. I take about 10-20 pictures every single time I’m taking a photo. I also take tons of worthless screenshots. By using AmazonPhotos to backup my photos I’m able to keep every single one archived and then keep my photo library on my iPhone cleared out. The initial backup took about a day. I had 31,000 pictures. Excessive I know! But now it takes only a minute per day to backup the new stuff. Love love love! I hate backing up with iCloud and tech support suggested google photos as an alternative. I hated that app. It also doesn’t keep the pictures full resolution. Try this out, you won’t be disappointed!

I use prime photos to back up all my photos from all devices. AmazonPhotos makes it easy to view my whole library from my phone or iPad. It is also very simple to upload photos directly from my devices. Several years ago there was a sync function on AmazonPhotos version of prime photos that could make it easy to accidentally delete pictures from prime photos when you deleted them from your phone. That sync feature, as far as i can tell, has been removed from AmazonPhotos , so you can use prime as a simple backup rather than a mirrored drive like iCloud or 365. The sync version still exists when accessing prime photos through your browser, such as you would on your computer, but even there i turned it off.

I had 18 years worth of pics on multiple devices, PCs, iPads, iPhones, macs, thumb drives, sd cards, all of it. Things started going bad, hard drives started crashing and the threat of my family’s memories made me look for an offsite storage of everything in case something happened to my home. I used to have to load up old devices and pray they’d work long enough for me to pull stuff off of them. Now, it’s available on anything that has an internet connection. 74k photos and over 115gb of videos all in one place. My 3 kids births, all their birthdays, and everything in between are at my fingertips. I’m super grateful this technology is available.

This is generally a great app with a great back end. They recently updated the UI and have inexplicably removed (or buried or hid in such a way that I can’t find it) the ability to just type a search term in the photo search. Now, if I want to search for a photo taken in a particular place or in a particular year, or featuring a particular person, I can only scroll and scroll and scroll until the UI chooses to show me a pre-defined button with the search term I want to use. Very irritating. I can see this new UI as useful if you have very few years of photos, very few family members, or very few locations, but it’s an incredibly annoying update if you’re a normal person. Please put back a text search box somewhere in the UI.

I really love your app except two things...one is a long-standing complaint, that exif info including time&date&location, does download with pictures. The second is a new development since recent update. The “add to favorites” is right above the “add to album” tab. I’ve been careful only to hit add to album, and for some reason, it makes the whole album “add to favorites” and I can’t figure out how to remove that designation for one photo, let along a newly created album that has over 1,000 photos&videos...also, why isn’t the “add to album” on the top but you put it on the bottom? I don’t know who designed this specific change, but it’s not user friendly, especially it adding yo favorites when I’ve been careful to ensure I hit only “add to albums”. Please fix.

That’s a true statement, let me tell you why. All the other photo clouds tell you that they saving us disk space by backing up our photos and saving them all in their clouds. Not true! They copy our photos , but when we erase our original photos from our devices they also get deleted from the clouds. They are not supposed to be just copying our photos, they are supposed to be saving them after we delete them from our devices. Otherwise where are we saving any space on our devices? This is the only one that I found that actually lets you delete photos from your devices and safely saves your originals. Therefore actually freeing up our disk space. Great app!

With a prime membership AmazonPhotos is included, it has lots of storage space, but lacks in keeping up with recent photos. I have my photos in AmazonPhotos to scroll across my tv screen as a screen saver and I have seen photos pop up that I do not have anymore and had forgotten all about, they are very random. In which it is nice to see surprise photos but I’m more concerned with recent photos I have taken and they are there floating around in space somewhere. It is good to have for a extra backup, especially when my iPhone is constantly telling me to pay more for storage, not this gal, I will use other apps to save my photos that I can access anytime similar to AmazonPhotos. All in all I would recommend it

I am in my 70s and realized that I had so many online photos between my phone, computer and tablet and I knew I should move them to a flash drive or something for my family but dreaded how long it was going to take me. Then I learned about this program. It is so easy because it does all the work. You don’t have to sit there saving pictures from one source to another. I told it to save the pictures that were on my tablet and within minutes it saved over 1000 pictures while I watched a movie. It adds any new pictures you take them automatically and you can edit pictures you have duplicates of etc. I think you’ll love it.

This is almost a great program. However, it falls short in a number of crucial ways.

Firstly, there is no way to correct the many mistakes the facial recognition software makes. When it fails to recognize that an image contains a person, I can’t manually tag it. What’s worse, it frequently misidentifies two or three people as being the same person, and there’s no way to manually disambiguate. This is an essential function that must be added, and which competitor programs already have.

Frustratingly, the facial recognition 'People' folders index only the photos uploaded by your own account. They leave out all the photos of the same people in the family vault. So it’s not a very useful compilation of all the photos of somebody.

Thirdly, while AmazonPhotos allows manual album creation, your albums are stored only on your own account, and are not visible to anyone you add to your family vault. It’d be a huge bonus to be able to share albums with your family members.

I’d also really appreciate being able to rotate a photo right in my account, without having to download it to my device, rotate it in a separate program, and re-upload it to prime photo all over again.

With a few fixes, this can be an excellent photo storage program.

Overall, this is a pretty good photo app for those looking for an alternative photo App, which also contains decent editing and storage features. It does have annoying aspects to it as well, such as not being able to default to a selected Album, nor the ability to lock individual Albums. (Unless all pics are placed in the Hidden Photos section, which somewhat defeats the purpose) A few annoying bugs when it comes to storage or organization. E.g..Pics selected as Album covers are lost the moment you move new photos into that particular albums. Tech support is a little disappointing. Quick to respond, however not quite attentive to questions, issues or problem solving. Kinda felt like Robo Support. My suggestion would be to try before you buy!

AmazonPhotos keeps all your photos safe by uploading them to the cloud so that if your device is lost or destroyed, you won’t lose them. Your photos are available through AmazonPhotos at any time you have connectivity, so you can access ALL your photos from your phone at any time without using up your storage space. My favorite features are the automatic upload from both my phone and desktop, and the ability to search by person, subject (like “dogs”) or date. I would like for it to be easier to save a set of pictures to a folder or album on my device

AmazonPhotos works wonderfully 90% of the time. Open it up, it automatically scans phone and saves all photos and videos, then you have great access to your entire library wherever you go! However every once in awhile it will get stuck. Like really really stuck. Will need to delete app and re-download. This is an excruciating process because then it needs to scan the whole photo library again. Another issue is it will "miss" videos (usually not photos) in the auto scan that you will have to manually upload. Overall I love the ease and functionality. My husband and I log onto the same account and can see all our pics in one place.