I had initially dismissed Amazon Prime Photos. The unlimited storage option was appealing, but Google Photos seemed like a better system. For one thing, Google's app is nice to use and seems to make nice collages and memories for me to look back on. The only sticking point for me was that I didn't want to pay for Google.
Anyone who uses Photos knows Google lets you store compressed images but not originals unless you're happy to eat into your storage. As I'm paying for Apple's iCloud too, I sort of wanted to avoid coughing up for another service. But Amazon's Prime Photos is unlimited and doesn't mention compressing images.
But Amazon has another amazing feature that it hides in plain sight - it allows you to store raw image files in your free allowance. If you don't know what a raw file is, then this article might not be for you - but if you're still curious it's the output from the camera sensor without compression (or only light compression). The advantages of raw are that you keep the dynamic range of the image, and can do a lot of post-processing tweaks to compensate for under or overexposure.
Here's how it works - if you have Prime Photos with your Prime subscription, or you've paid the yearly fee (it's only $12 for just photos, by the way, a bargain for unlimited storage) then you can simply upload as many images to your drive as you like and they won't count against your storage allowance.
If you're a photographer though, the really great news is that Amazon allows you to store both jpegs and raw files. My SLR produces jpegs of more than 10mb, and the raw counterparts are as much as 50mb. A few albums of photos and you're talking about many, many gigabytes. In fact, I totted my total image library up and got to 1TB so far.
Long term, I won't be able to carry on storing raw images forever. It's just not practical to keep a high-resolution jpg and a raw file of the same image. But I like doing it, and the jpg gives me a simple, easy to view image, while the Nikon raw file gives me something I can work with and tweak light levels and generally make better images. So perhaps if I can hand off some of my raw files to the cloud, then maybe I don't need to keep them locally.
Of course there is always the possibility that Amazon will stop supporting raw images, or it will only give you a smaller amount of storage. If that happens I guess I'll deal with it, but for now Amazon Prime Photos has a truly wonderful Easter egg that I didn't know about until I looked into it.
If you're a photographer whose image library is getting out of control, I'd urge you to look into Prime Photos. The app is a bit of a pain, but when you find the "upload without syncing" button, you'll be all set. If nothing else, this helps with a little peace of mind as an offsite backup, something that's, for home users, usually quite impractical for large image files.
