How to upload photos to amazon prime from android phone

I collect a lot of travel photos. In fact, I’ve taken over 60,000 photos in the last 3 years! I have a solid system for backing up my travel photos already, and I wanted to expand on how useful Amazon Prime Photos can be for you!

Amazon Prime Photos is available on your existing Amazon Prime membership. It provides web, desktop and mobile access to all of your photos. With your Prime membership, you get unlimited photo storage and 5GB of video storage. If you don’t have Amazon Prime, sign up for free.

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When you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you'll get Prime Photos automatically. With Prime Photos, you'll be able to kick-start your photo backup system!

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How does Amazon Prime Photos work?

There are three main plans that you can choose from.

1. Free with Prime. Like I mentioned above, you’ll be able to store all of your photos, for free!

2. 100GB of storage for $1.99/month. This wouldn’t work for me. My photo catalog is pushing a few TB and I would fill up 100GB in a weekend.

3. 1TB of storage for $6.99/month. I would consider this as an option if I didn’t already have a 1TB-Dropbox plan. This will be good for most people, as you can store a good number of photos with this plan.

When you subscribe to Prime photos (through Amazon Prime), you’re able to access your files through a mobile app, a web app and a desktop app. Aside from being able to back up your photos, you can also use Amazon Photos to search for common things within your photos like food, dogs or trees. It can recognize people, too!

Backing up your photos with Amazon Prime Photos

Aside from the storage plans, let’s go a little deeper on how you can use Amazon Prime photos today. But first, let’s briefly talk about backing up your photos in general. Photo backups are an important part of your workflow if you want to keep your photos safe. I (and most of the internet) will recommend backing up your photos in at least two additional places.

It’s a good idea to have a copy of your photo library on your local hard drive, to have a backup on an external hard drive and to have a backup somewhere in the cloud.

Now that we’ve covered backing up your photos, let’s review how to back up your photos using Amazon Prime Photos.

Amazon Photos Web app

From the web client, you can go to Add > Upload Photos in the top navigation bar.

From there, you’ll find your Amazon Drive folders where you can add your photos. Personally, I like to categorize all of my photos by year.

Amazon Photos Desktop app

As an alternative to the web client, you can use the desktop app as well. I do all of my photo work on a Mac, so I can speak to the Mac app.

An older version of this app wasn’t very good and limited uploads to four at a time. Uploading RAW files took forever (it almost took a month when I first started uploading!) because it could only process four large files at once. The updated app is decent and now supports eight concurrent uploads!

After a shoot, I’ll queue up an upload. I find that keeping my uploads small, it’s manageable for the app to handle.

You can set up the app to schedule backups or do a one-time backup. I prefer doing a one-time backup because I constantly move files around, as my local hard drive fills up quickly.

Amazon Photos Mobile app

While the mobile app exists on iPhone and Android, I don’t use it. I use Amazon Prime Photos as a backup and not as a place to view my photos.

Benefits of using Amazon Photos

I’ve had a hard drive fail before and I’m glad that I had my photo files backed up. Without that backup, I would have lost a few years’ worth of work. When you use Prime Photos, you can ensure that your photos are safe! As an added benefit, you’re able to browse photos on your phone and computer and share with friends and family. You’re also able to order prints.

I can see a use case where you take a few family photos and you want to share them at a family gathering. You can open the folder where you have the files and pass your phone to whoever wants to see the photos!

In addition to the features of the platform, it’s free! Well, kind of. If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, you get Amazon Prime Photos for free. There’s no additional cost to you. You can upgrade your plan if you want to increase your video storage.

Once per year, Amazon has Amazon Prime Day which has some of the best deals all year around. Check out our guide where we handpick some of our favorite Amazon Prime Day deals for travelers.

Limitations of using Amazon Photos

When new image formats come out, sometimes Amazon doesn’t recognize them as “images.” Because of this, it eats away at your low 5GB-storage cap of other files. I had this happen to me when I was testing a new camera that had a brand new RAW file type.

This isn’t an issue for most people and you can see the supported image formats to confirm that your images are supported. If they aren’t supported, you can convert those unsupported RAW files to DNG files.

I’ve found the uploader to be buggy at times, and I found that the upload speeds aren’t as good with some other image backup services. Amazon is always improving its software, so this might not be the case for much longer.

Can you print photos with Amazon Prime Photos?

Yes! In fact, Amazon makes it easy to print your photos. They have a large selection of different products, like canvas prints, metal prints, photo books, calendars and so much more. Amazon Prime members get free shipping.

Print your photos!

How to get Amazon Prime Photos

If you don’t have Amazon Prime, then sign up! Amazon Prime has a lot of good benefits like fast shipping for products and access to other video and music services.

If you already have Amazon Prime, then you’re good to go. Visit the sign in page to start uploading. If you don’t want Amazon Prime, you can still sign up for Amazon Photos based on the price points above.

I hope you were able to learn something about photo backups and more information about one of the many excellent resources out there for keeping your photos safe.

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Last updated on September 15th, 2022