How Amazon’s unlimited photo storage for Cloud Drive works

Amazon Prime has evolved a lot in recent time. Designed in the beginning as a yearly-paid subscription service to cover all shipping and handling costs for Amazon purchases, it is now offering additional benefits such as TV streaming to customers.

The price of Prime has gone up as well. If you are in the US, you pay $99 per year for it (Amazon Student members pay $49). The price is different in Europe. Here in Germany you pay €49 for instance which is $61 when converted.

The most recent addition to Amazon's Prime service is unlimited photo storage for all Prime customers.

As you may know, Amazon is operating Cloud Drive, an Internet-based file hosting and synchronization service. The basic Cloud Drive plan is free and comes with 5 Gigabyte of storage.

While that does not change, Prime members can upload as many photos as they want to the service without affecting the 5 Gigabyte limit.

According to Amazon, Prime Photos is currently only available in the US. I was able to make use of it as well with my account and while I cannot confirm that it is available worldwide, you may want to try it as well to see if it is the case for you too.

To use Prime Photos, either use the Amazon Cloud Drive application or visit the website directly. There you find listed your plan and whether you benefit from unlimited photo storage.

If unlimited photo storage is enabled for your account you will notice that the storage size of all images on the account does not count against the overall storage quota of it.

Amazon notes that Prime unlimited photo storage is only for non-commercial use.

Limitations

Amazon's Cloud Drive has the following limitations in regards to images:

1. A file may not exceed 2 Gigabyte.
2. File and folder names cannot exceed 255 characters.
3. Photo formats that are supported are: bmp, gif, jpeg, jpg, png, raw, tif and tiff

It is still possible to upload other image formats such as webp but they won't benefit from free storage or be displayed in photos & videos but in all files instead only.

So what happens when you cancel your Prime membership?

If you decide to cancel Amazon Prime at one point in time, all images that you have uploaded to the service will count against your storage quota as soon as Prime expires.

Your account will be limited if that causes the quota to be exceeded. If that is the case you won't be allowed to upload new files to the cloud.

What you are still allowed to do however is to download, view and delete files for "at least three months". Amazon will inform you if the account is still over the quota after the three month period. It may remove files permanently from the account if that is the case.

Cloud Drive is available on the web, as a desktop program for Windows, and as applications for Android and iOS.