Amazon Prime Photos
amazon.comIt's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much:
- Box: $180/year for unlimited (https://www.box.com/pricing/)
- Google: $120/year for 1TB (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)
- Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB (https://www.dropbox.com/pro)
- Amazon: $60/year for unlimited (https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything/)
- Microsoft: $60/year for 1TB (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-office-36...)
They all offer approximately the same service, but from cheapest to priciest is almost 3x. I wonder how much sand is left in the hourglass for companies like Box & Dropbox? Also, how much longer will Google keep their price at $120/year for 1TB when Amazon is half that for unlimited storage? Also, does your average Joe even care when you get 15GB for free from Google?
You used business pricing for Box, Dropbox and Microsoft but consumer pricing for Google. Google gives unlimited storage for $120/user/year as part of Apps for Work Unlimited: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en
Also "offer approximately the same service" is a bit off. Amazon doesn't have any kind of SLA for Cloud Drive and while Box, Microsoft and Google provide SLAs. In addition, while the older competitors provide essentially a full office suite and a bunch of features like OCR, Amazon provides nothing but a very basic web interface that allows you to see previews.
That's Dropbox's consumer pricing. Their business pricing is $180/user/year ($15/user/mo) for unlimited.
https://www.dropbox.com/business/pricing
(nb: used to work there)
re:GoogleUnlimited, That's really interesting. Are you aware of any downside? Ie, Why a user might choose Google's normal $120/y over Google Apps Unlimited?
Consumer accounts have more complete access to Google products. For example there's currently no way to get a Project Fi number on an Apps for Work account.
Also the business plans are theoretically limited to 1TB per users for organizations with less than 5 users. I'm not sure if that's still the case since I seem to have actual unlimited (2TB use now) with a single user organization.
There is a 5 user minimum for Google Apps for Work Unlimited.
Absolutely none of these are "unlimited" storage. It's simply overselling.
Even the providers that are selling N terabytes for $Q are counting on a certain percentage of those users not utilizing that much. This is why the prices vary so wildly, because each provider is doing different math and hedging different bets.
> hedging different bets
More specifically, they each have their own unique business model which they believe will perform best in the market. You can "oversell" future storage successfully if you know the usage growth rates.
No doubt also different things for each hidden in the TOS. This same thing happens with "unlimited" web hosting providers (godaddy in particular).
The problem with amazon cloud drive is that they dont offer a synt client like the rest.
So no desktop sync, only manual uploads and downloads.
Yeah the clients are pretty bad. They do have a synology sync tool which is good, otherwise I did it manually for our photos since Adobe lightroom can organize folders nicely
What do you mean? (removed link)
Amazon's desktop app supports batch uploads and downloads, but not sync to/from Amazon Cloud Drive.
However, there are 3rd-party options for this:
• Arq: https://www.arqbackup.com/
• odrive: https://www.odrive.com/amazon
• Synology Cloud Sync: http://www.macdrifter.com/2015/06/synology-cloud-sync-adds-a...
Warning, drive-by download link in parent.
The Amazon pricing is sufficiently cheap it probably comes with caveats similar to Glacier. Rather than as convoluted as Glacier they probably just have fixed retrieval amounts and rates, rather than the "get more or faster, pay more" Glacier sliding scale. Whereas Google is probably their nearline service. I have no idea what Microsoft's is. Backblaze also has $0.005/GB/mo which puts it in the $60/year for 1TB range using B2 Cloud service, but it's more like Google Nearline I think.
All of these have different retrieval rules and rates, so it's not just the annual.
Many home users have managed to saturate their (unusually fast) connections sending/receiving to Amazon Cloud Drive: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/32oniv/so_how_...
And it doesn't have Glacier-like restrictions, at least in terms of retrieval delay. Nor does Backblaze. The difference with Backblaze is that it's only replicated within a single datacenter. If anything happens to that DC you're out of luck.
The typical pattern for photo users will be a large amount of upload at the start as they upload their collection, then occasional browsing of photos on the amazon website, which will be mostly smaller thumbnails. Rarely once in awhile users will request large originals. You will have an even smaller amount of people download their entire collection of originals.
With these patterns, you can make a system that puts everything on S3 at first, makes thumbnails and starts moving most things to glacier based on access patterns.
Such a system would be wonderful, particularly if it used Backblaze B2 or Google Nearline instead of Glacier (to get around the hours of delay).
Unfortunately, no such system yet exists and the complexities of dealing with many people's libraries (particularly regarding RAW files) make it more difficult than it seems (I've looked at doing this myself in the past).
So annoying that Amazon unlimited is only available in the US.
Is it not prime you are thinking about?
I am pretty sure cloud drive is available outside the US.
What a pity
>does your average Joe even care when you get 15GB for free from Google?
Not sure what you mean there, but for me, 15G is plenty (but then, it's mostly just going to email storage).
Personally, I'm happy to keep paying Dropbox. The Amazon and Google offerings aren't so much commercial products as hegemony extensions. When something's a sideline, I think there's a much higher risk of a mediocre product (e.g., Google Plus) or that eventually gets killed because strategery (e.g., Google Reader).
I'm ok with that for things I don't care too much about losing, but my photos are precious to me, so I'll keep them with a company whose main business is not losing my stuff. Dropbox has one job, and so far they have consistently acted like they know it.
Google Photos is really good at viewing/galleries/sharing and indexing, and especially so at applying machine intelligence for categorization and tagging. How well does Dropbox handle this stuff?
Also iCloud 120 $ per year for 1 TB. The pattern I see is that successful companies that already have their product out there charge more: Google has a big install base of Android phones and the Chrome browser. Apple has a big install base of iOS devices and Macs. Dropbox is also really popular. Microsoft on the other hand mostly has legacy installations on the desktop and a tiny share of the mobile market - even less so if you look at typical power users that use products like these. Amazon is the total newcomer.
So I guess both try to attract pro users with low cost.
Do any of these companies provide an official Linux client?
Dropbox does.
Didn't they launch this last year?
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/cloud-storage/amazon-pr...
Huh, that's weird. We'll take "launches" out of the title.
I guess nobody paid attention last time. It's a classic trick to launch over and over again until someone cares to give two cents.
Well to be fair, I don't see anywhere in the page itself indicating that this is a new launch, just the HN title.
Not 100% sure but I think the last time around it was announced as free with prime - https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/primephotos ? This time around it looks like a standalone product.
Amazon relaunches the same products all the time. It's a soft launch until it gains traction or dies.
nothing was relaunched, it's just a landing page. i'm not sure why this is on HN.
Ah. The product I worked at at Amazon had a similar landing page to it's original landing page a year prior so that's why I was thinking it might be a soft relaunch. Amazon might have email blasted a ton of current customers with an offer which is why it resurfaced. I didn't know Amazon already offered this service; I'm only familiar with Amazon Cloud Drive.
I was going to say... we were launching it just after I left the team last year!
Reminds me of Microsoft's unlimited storage adventure
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-...
Bingo. And in years gone by Bitcasa did the same, starting with an unlimited plan and once people were locked in, increasing prices 10x (from $99 to $999):
http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/19/bitcasa-infinite-cloud-st...
Bitcasa is even worse. Not only did they sell unlimited and retract it, they claim zero knowledge encryption without providing it, as the key is linked to the password which is used to access your account through the web interface.
The sad thing is apparently they're partnered with larger companies like Samsung, Intel and Huawei, so their product is being spread to people who likely don't know any better.
Amazon nags me quite a bit and tries to upsale me to Prime on the Amazon website.
Every single time I click "check out" and in several other places I get these Prime popovers or full page ads with a very small "No thanks" or "Cancel" link. There are now even normal non-Amazon products that are sold only to Prime members. Is this how Amazon.com cares about loyal 15+ year consumers?
I DO NOT WANT PRIME, GOT IT? Not now, not tomorrow, not next months, never. Why should I pay a premium membership for a virtual shopping center?!? Are there any "Prime"-nag-screen blocker browser plugins?...
I had this problem with the Amazon Music app even though I already pay for Amazon Prime. Every time I opened it, it would be "Hey, want to join Prime Music?" And I would say no, because IDGAF. And then it would ask me a second time, as if it couldn't quite believe me.
After months of this, I said yes just to get it to shut up, which meant that any attempt to listen to my music would it involve displaying lots of things that they could give me for free, none of which I wanted. Eventually I just stopped using the Amazon Music app.
It amazes me how much large company product design becomes about what companies want the users to do, with so little attention paid to what users actually want. I already had to uninstall the Amazon app and block notifications from the Kindle app because they insisted on chirpily notifying me of exciting special offers. By which they meant their various attempts to get me to buy crap I don't want.
I'm seriously curious why you don't want prime. Do you live in an area where it doesn't benefit you or something? If you are really ordering more than a few items a year for them, it makes total financial sense to get it for the shipping alone.
The movies, photo storage, tv shows, music etc. are just icing on the cake.
What's so special about "saying no"? I have my principles, and companies better respect them.
I got several downvotes for my comment, but in the end more upvotes.
Btw. shipping is free for my check outs too. Maybe I just don't want and need their streaming services? Maybe I already use something that fits my needs? Maybe I live in an area where they tested Prime and therefor made the delivery time worse (from 2 days to 4-5 days)?
Ask yourself: would you like to pay a membership fee for Walmart/etc and for shopping centers? Nevertheless, Amazon.com is first and foremost an digital shopping center. It's my right as a customer to say "no thanks", and Amazon should acknowledge my decision.
To clear up the pricing confusion:
- It's FREE for Prime Members
- It's $11.99 a year for non-prime members
The other caveat is that it's unlimited for photos, but only 5gig of video.
Can I store my videos frame-by-frame as images?
ffmpeg -i input.mov -r 24 output_%06d.png
Great! Now embed audio into each of these pngs as a waveform at the bottom.
There is another plan for unlimited video for $ 59.99: https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything/?ref_=cd_...
Still, no playback for 5+ min of video which makes it not usable for me.
All JPG images are free, so go for it.
$11.99 a year is quite cheap. Although I have MUCH less than 100GB of images, so I think Google's $1.99/mo for 100GB is better so I can use the rest of the storage for something else.
The risk of Amazon shutting down your account, even as a Prime member, is too high to justify investment in any of their cloud services or hardware. Even if they don't actually shut down your account and just send you threats based on fictional terms of service that you've never agreed to, as they did to me, I would never trust them with anything sensitive again. I wouldn't be surprised if they start shutting down AWS services in the future for arbitrary violations not stated in any terms of service. This kind of behavior should not have to be tolerated by loyal, paying customers, yet Amazon has been doing it continuously for many years.
Can you elaborate? I'd be curious to hear more. I'm trying to decide between Backblaze B2 and Amazon cloud drive for personal backup and archive.
They haven't actually shut down the account, they only sent a threatening email (see below). This was for around ~$100 worth of merchandise when I easily spend (or used to) $10-20k a year and had a paid Prime membership ($100 / yr). When I replied asking WTF they're talking about because what they refer to is clearly not in their "About Our Returns Policies" or anywhere on their site, their reply was confusing and did not assure me that this was a mistake or apologize. I've been boycotting them ever since because I fear another return will actually shut down my account and I have unfortunately purchased Kindle books.
If this is how they treat they $10-20k per year customers, I'm sure no one will think twice about threatening and shutting down others' accounts (there are plenty of stories all over the Internet about this if you'd like to search). I'm almost sure this is an automated email, of course, but that doesn't change things one bit, as their human representative who responded to my email wasn't much more helpful and tried to downplay the original email without assuring me that this was a mistake and that they would not shut down my account for extremely normal activity. There's absolutely nothing abnormal about any of the returns I had then or at any other time in the past. A lot of their merchandise is just pure shite.
--- ---
Hello,
We have noticed that you have returned a large number of your orders. While we expect occasional problems with orders, such large numbers of returns can suggest that customers are unaware of our return policies.
We want to call your attention to our returns policies because repeated misuse can result in the closure of your Amazon account. To learn more about our policies, search “About Our Returns Policies” in the Help section of Amazon.com.
If there is something we can do to help solve any recurring problems you are having with your orders, please reply to this email to reach an Account Specialist.
Sincerely,
Account Specialist
This is the problem with so many services tied to one account.
On a side note, I was led to believe your shutdown threat revolved around using Amazon's Cloud Drive in an unintended way.
Why did they threaten to shut down your account?
Probably doing something that violates TOS or something borderline illegal. I see cases like his all the time on various forums and they seems to be missing some important details...
There's nothing illegal about returning defective products. In fact, there's nothing in the TOS about returning too many products or anything like that.
Oh okay I see. I thought you meant you were using Amazon Web Services to do something or host something borderline illegal, which I have actually seen a couple times while working here.
Please see above comment.
I'm sure someone somewhere is working on code to break up large files into multiple images.
$1/month for image hosting is dirt cheap though if you can do public url access to images.
Anyone have any info on Amazon's security practices for their cloud/photo storage? I'm slightly more tempted to go with them to store my photos than Google, if only for the implicit contract that I'm paying them to be a Prime Member and hence paying in some way for the storage, so they should in theory be less likely to try to profit off of my photos...but I'm also still paranoid.
I'd be surprised if they aren't just using a thin layer on top of S3 which is pretty solid. Historically amazon has a really good track record of keeping data secured.
I wonder if you can use it to back up arbitrary files - if you take any file and prepend it with "GIF89a=\t0\t;;;;" it becomes a valid GIF.
ha, I remember when people used Gmail to do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS
This was announced a couple months ago.
I just use Google Photos for backup which while is reduced in quality its enough for my needs. Best of all its unlimited storage and its free.
Does anyone know what the privacy restrictions around your photos are? Does amazon reserve the right to scan/analyze the images? I'm becoming increasingly wary of freebies like this, especially ones that provide advertisers/retailers a detailed and intimate view into your life.
The Cloud Drive terms[1] don't sound like they're particularly interested in the contents of your photos, however they are somewhat vague. Section 3.3 seems to have the meat of it:
3.3 Our Use of Your Files to Provide the Service. 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. Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice located at www.amazon.com/privacy.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?ie=UTF...
Quite helpful. I think a part of note is "...and enforce the terms of the Agreement" as it might relate to content that is not permitted. Would be helpful to compare/contrast with any statements regarding uploading of copyright material not copyright of the account owner, which seems like the typical pretext for basic overview? Just musing here.
Yeah, I'd imagine third-party copyright enforcement would be the primary consideration there, though they also include the typical prohibitions of objectionable material.
1.2 Using Your Files with the Service. You may use the Service only to store, retrieve, manage, and access Your Files for personal, non-commercial purposes using the features and functionality we make available. You may not use the Service to store, transfer or distribute content of or on behalf of third parties, to operate your own file storage application or service, to operate a photography business or other commercial service, or to resell any part of the Service. You are solely responsible for Your Files and for complying with all applicable copyright and other laws, including import and export control laws and regulations, and with the terms of any licenses or agreements to which you are bound. You must ensure that Your Files are free from any malware, viruses, Trojan horses, spyware, worms, or other malicious or harmful code.
1.3 Sharing Your Files. The Service may provide features that allow you to share Your Files with others. You may only share Your Files in which you have all necessary copyright and other rights. If you share a file, anyone with access to that file may view and download copies of the file. You are solely responsible for how you share Your Files and who may access Your Files that you share. You may not share files (a) that contain defamatory, threatening, abusive, pornographic, or otherwise objectionable material, (b) that advocate bigotry, hatred, or illegal discrimination, or (c) if sharing those files violates any law, any intellectual property, publicity, privacy, or other right of others, or any license or other agreement by which you are bound.
This is a deceptive HN post with a "vote-bait" title. There was no launch. This is a year old.
Has anyone successfully backed up iPhone Live Photos on a photo storage service that's not iCloud?
Are there any tools to upload the Photos library for Mac users? I tried the "Amazon Cloud Drive" app, but it's useless. Even when I drill down into the .photoslibrary package the Amazon syncing app gives a "File type error".
My thoughts exactly. The first company (besides Apple) to come up with a Photos plugin has my business. I'm currently using the Apple cloud product but it is sooo confusing it's almost not worth it.
IMHO, Dropbox got this right. Simple to install, simple to configure, simple to use. Apple's solution is a confusing mess of Family members, devices, Apple iCloud accounts, etc. Every time I share something with my wife's iPad I have to physically touch it to make sure I did it correctly and it is syncing like it should. sigh
It's a free trials. It costs $11.99/year.
This detail is horribly hidden. It looks like it's 11.99/year for non-prime members. Free for prime members.
Getting this from, go into your Amazon Cloud Drive, then click Manage Storage on the right side.
Two plans listed, Unlimited Photos and Unlimited Everything.
It's an add-on service for prime members not a trial. I'm not sure if there is an option for non-prime members.
Edit: looks like it is 11.99 for non-prime members. Also the unlimited everything option looks pretty cool. Really trumps dropbox and google drive.
On that note, what's the most convenient way out there if you want to use a cloud service as an external drive to store most of your images in RAW format?
Ideally you wouldn't have to keep them all on your local drive, only the ones you're working with. I know S3 would be a fit, but I'm thinking something equally cheap, but with a nicer web interface specific to photography and similar affordable pricing.
Amazon considers Canon, Nikon, and Sony RAW formats, as well as Adobe Digital Negatives, as "photos" in terms of unlimited storage. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...)
3 backups
2 formats
1 offsite
Local computer has photos you're working with currently, move RAW + JPG to a Synology when you're done, set up a job to sync the synology with Amazon Photos.
Right now I use backblaze for $5 a month.
This covers my photos and videos on OSX.
I saw in another comment that backblaze is only one datacenter.
If Amazon included video even if it was only 1 TB I would dump backblaze.
I may still use the prime photos for my iphone as apple cannot backup the amount of photos I take to their cloud.
Transferring them to the iMac for backblaze is a pain.
If Prime Photos had a print service where we could do Christmas cards etc that would be even cooler.
Why do you have to transfer your photos to the iMac for back blaze? They have an iOS client. [0]
[0]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/backblaze/id628638330?mt=8
The Backblaze iOS client is for access/retrieval, not for backing up files from the iOS device.
Amazon have 56$/year everything unlimited plan. It's cheaper than $5 a year, right?
Anyone use this service as a backup of photos? I have several terabytes of photos (in RAW format), which is not a huge expense to throw onto Glacier...but if I could just toss them up in an album as a last-resort-yet-free backup...then I'd feel even better about still subscribing to Amazon Prime despite infrequently ordering physical products.
Maybe this could be an alternative to Flickr for me. Unfortunately there is no Linux client, I hope there is an API.
If they included unlimited video storage this would be more interesting. (This was announced November 4th)
JPEG only? Or Raw/DNG too?
They support RAW files: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
This makes it superior to Google Photos for backup in my opinion. Amazon provides free (with Prime) backup with no limits, RAW support and no recompression. Google Photos provides it for free but with lossy compression and without the possibility of retaining the range of RAW.
It definitely makes it superior to Google Photos for backup, but Google Photos is drastically superior for viewing your photos. Automatic face detection / grouping, and really good search functionality help a ton.
time to ditch flickr then? as I have the prime membership at amazon? wish I can import flickr into amazon somehow.
on the other hand I hope they support client-side encryption so someone can only view the pictures after they're decrypted
This isn't really the same as Flickr though. It's photo backup.
For that, it may actually be better than flickr in that it apparently supports the major raw file formats including DNG.
However, it doesn't seem to be designed for any sort of photo sharing (although you can access photos remotely yourself).
Bottom line is that, if you're just using flickr for backup then, yes, something like this is probably a better match. On the other hand, if you use flickr as a photo sharing site and the backup is at least partially incidental, then I'd probably stay with flickr and maybe use both.
I have a flickr Pro subscription but I don't really view it as a backup system although having an additional set of (JPEG) backups of my favorite photos is a nice side benefit.
how to define "picture", can I hide my files into some picture then upload it and essentially use amazon-picture-unlimited as an unlimited file storage?
While I haven't read Amazon's terms of use as to whether this is ok from a policy perspective, most back-up services don't check for "files within pictures". In fact, the hiding of data within imagery is called Steganography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
Although the intent with Steganography is (weak) cryptography, the method should work for your purposes; only way to know is to test it! Admittedly until you've tested this thoroughly, I would not RELY on this for anything other than a fun test. Enjoy! :-)
Is this new? I've been using this for over a month now.
I wish Google and or iOS would allow me to tag.