Lock-in and missing features aside, preserving the binary data is pretty cool, and it's honestly the most important thing when picking a place to store photos (for me).
The most annoying thing was it treated the NEF and JPG files separately, and showed pictures twice in the UI.
But probably the better test will be to see how files differ between iOS devices, and the Mac Photos.app when that is released.
...
Running this through exiftool, the image downloaded via icloud.com/photos has the following EXIF stripped which is the likely cause of the above change:
GPS Latitude Ref
GPS Longitude Ref
GPS Altitude Ref
GPS Time Stamp
GPS Speed Ref
GPS Speed
GPS Img Direction Ref
GPS Img Direction
GPS Dest Bearing Ref
GPS Dest Bearing
GPS Date Stamp
GPS Altitude
GPS Date/Time
GPS Latitude
GPS Longitude
GPS Position
Am I just being cynical when I think that all new free photo storage just means that automated image recognition software has gotten good enough that companies want to process all my images and target me better? Is this like gmail where they get to machine read all your emails or is this the type of cloud that is just storage?
A better cynical view is that this is about lockin. You're much less likely to cancel your $99/year account if you'll have to transfer terabytes of photos to a different provider.
Acquiring new customers is always significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers.
The terms of how they use the photos in the EULA seem rather reasonable at first glance: "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."
BUT: then they tack on "Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice." In the Privacy Notice, they state that any information you give Amazon in any way may be used "for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future shopping for you, improving our stores…" Not sure how this interfaces with the Cloud EULA, but it seems to do the opposite of "respecting your privacy."
Encrypt your images. If they don't accept the encrypted data, represent the encrypted data as RGB color values in BMP format (forget about lossless compression, it won't make sense on an encrypted data stream; use lossy compression before encrypting instead).
You're not being cynical. That's exactly what they will do and much more. I would only upload files that you don't mind sharing with your spouse, kids, and friends. And that goes for any cloud services, not just Amazon.
Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.
If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case, why pay extra for AMZN's service?
I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a hard drive periodically.
There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?
What’s superbly dumb is that we can’t use the storage and the clients interchangeably. The storage is almost always tied to the clients. I so wish I could just start the photo app of my choice and simply pointed it to my single paid cloud storage with a standardized API, be it from Google, Apple, Amazon or DropBox.
There's no commercial market for what you're describing [4]. I spent 3 years building it [1]. It's all open source[2] and was funded by the Shuttleworth Foundation[3].
I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.
Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping, so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.
> I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.
I know what you mean. Lately I've gotten the impression that companies aren't offering photo storage as a feature to entice more people to use their services, but that they want our photos for some reason. Maybe advances in image recognition let them use the photos to mine marketable data?
To add one additional bit of supporting evidence, Snapfish (owned by HP) is currently offering a promotion for users of their mobile app (iOS & Android): 100 free prints per month for a year. Yes, 1200 free prints, all from your phone or tablet, as long as you store them at Snapfish.
And a couple of days ago Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers gets unlimited OneDrive storage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517475). Which also can upload all your photos...
I just wish OneDrive worked. I tried uploading 60k photos or so (less than 100GB)... OneDrive wouldn't even START the upload, and choked at 0.0kb uploaded. And even if it had started, OneDrive has a ridiculously low 20k file limit. I don't know why Microsoft has these weird bugs when everyone else seems to have it together.
With OneDrive and Amazon offering unlimited storage, it can't be long until Google and Dropbox (whose clients actually work) offer the same. But Google had better step up soon. I really don't see why I should continue to pay for GDrive when Amazon bundles unlimited storage with my already-essential Prime membership.
TBH I just tried it out, not as useful as previously thought.
$8.25 a month to get unlimited photo storage. It does not, however, give you ability to share albums, just individual files. Which makes it meh, since I can't share entire albums with people, which is what I'd want to do if I upload all my photos.
I have been looking for a way to easily offsite backup my photos without adding another row in my "cost of being alive"[1] spreadsheet (which already contains Prime). I don't need to access them, it doesn't have to be fancy, I just want to keep them safe at a second location.
[1] Add up all the monthly/yearly services you pay for so that if you did literally nothing at all, that's the amount you'd be charged per month. Things like github, prime, linode, gym, parking permit, ACM membership, etc. That's your cost to just be alive (before choosing to consume anything).
It's interesting. I signed up for Prime just for shipping. Now, I'm getting all these services "free". Granted, Prime's price increases here and there. But, because it's "free", it's easy for me to want to use it.
Eventually I'm going to be using so many Prime services that I'll never want to cancel it.
I'm exactly the opposite. I signed up for Prime for free shipping. They keep bundling it with more and more crap that I don't use. And it's not "free", the price is rising. I'll cancel if this keeps up.
CrashPlan+ for less then $5 a month unlimited backup. Also it runs on my Linux server and I can have all my computers and family computers backup to the linux machine for free then the Linux box is backed up.
One problem with Crashplan is that it seems to be all-or-nothing.
I've got it running on my desktop at home; I've got gigs and gigs of photos there. My macbook doesn't have enough free disk space to store all of them - and Crashplan doesn't let me store and sync just the 2014 photos.
Unlimited photo storage was long due IMO. I remember when Google launched Gmail with 1GB storage, they blew away all the competitors such as AOL,Yahoo,Hotmail. That was the great customer acquisition move by Google. I kept wondering why nobody came forward with unlimited cloud storage or specifically photo storage!
Also speaking strictly about the services I tried --
-- started using free Dropbox with camera uploads and with all friends referrals increased upto 10 GBs which is ultimately not good enough when you auto-upload images from phone camera.
-- Then started using Flickr with 1 TB which does not have desktop client for simple drag-and-drop.
-- Inconveniently tried using Google Drive on-and-off but simply cumbersome.
Seems as a Primer subscriber, I will find this service valuable for auto-camera upload.
> I kept wondering why nobody came forward with unlimited cloud storage or specifically photo storage!
Gmail could do that because "nobody" stored much e-mail. They could be on the case that most people would acquire more archived e-mail at a rate low enough that storage costs would drop quickly enough to cover a large percentage of the growth. In the end it also wasn't all that big deal when it came to customer acquisition: The major competitors all followed after they realised that it wouldn't drive their costs up all that much.
Pictures are different. They are already big. And everyone have lots of pictures. The main reason for signing up for cloud storage for pictures is that you have too many of them to store on your phone/tablet/other small devices, while for e-mail features, and network effects (all those people that knows your e-mail address) mattered far more than storage (consider that e.g. Yahoo charged to upgrade to 50MB or 100MB storage before Gmail, and almost nobody did - the free amount was sufficient for most users).
This is viable for Amazon because Prime customers are highly valuable and 1) we pay, 2) retaining us is worth lots of money - I've been up to over 200 orders a year from Amazon some years, 3) Amazon by now has years of experience driving down the cost of image storage, 4) it helps as a way of driving customers to their Fire platform (e.g. photos and videos in the Amazon cloud account show up on the Fire TV)
Great question for such an important lock-in mechanism. Perhaps a 30-day grace period? No media release so far that I can find references the conditions to keep data beyond the free 5GB Cloud Drive limit.
They jacked up the price of Amazon Prime significantly and play games with the shipping times compared to when the service first came out. Since most people probably subscribed in the 4th quarter. My guess is they've
So just like politicians roll out the pork before Election Day, Amazon is giving us all sorts of wonderful things to keep Prime around into the new year. (Example: the TV stick that doesn't ship until mid January)
Copy looks promising.
If you're willing to pay you use a service like rsync.net, or if you're willing to do a bit of setup you can just use any old shared hosting or VPS service. Or owncloud for some sugar.
As a, hopefully useful to someone, aside you can use icloud shared photo streams for nearly unlimited storage of casual photos/videos. You are limited to 5000, per stream. You can have 100 streams total: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT4858 Be aware, there is some downsizing that occurs: http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT5902 (see: `Which photo and video formats and sizes does iCloud Photo Sharing support?`)
Works nicely to get the most of your iOS device storage, share with family, mild private social interactions (e.g. commenting), OSX integration (e.g. you can have one central repo for wallpapers for all devices), etc.
Seems like all the big storage provider are bundling up feature. Integration with all their product for Apple, Office 365 for Microsoft, now this for Amazon.
I'm wondering if Dropbox has something in store ? Seems to me like they will need something soon to justify their premium prices.
This is interesting, but the features aren't comparable to Dropbox and this is a sideshow for Amazon. I don't want to store my precious files at a place where storing files isn't the primary focus of their business.
[+] [-] ihiram|11 years ago|reply
The most annoying thing was it treated the NEF and JPG files separately, and showed pictures twice in the UI.
[+] [-] kingnight|11 years ago|reply
Downloaded off device that image was taken with via Image Capture
Downloaded via iCloud.com/photos But probably the better test will be to see how files differ between iOS devices, and the Mac Photos.app when that is released....
Running this through exiftool, the image downloaded via icloud.com/photos has the following EXIF stripped which is the likely cause of the above change:
[+] [-] amalag|11 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
[+] [-] swartkrans|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chuckcode|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|11 years ago|reply
Acquiring new customers is always significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers.
[+] [-] 3JPLW|11 years ago|reply
BUT: then they tack on "Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice." In the Privacy Notice, they state that any information you give Amazon in any way may be used "for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future shopping for you, improving our stores…" Not sure how this interfaces with the Cloud EULA, but it seems to do the opposite of "respecting your privacy."
[+] [-] dheera|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mliker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|11 years ago|reply
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-p...
[+] [-] bengali3|11 years ago|reply
I believe this is the same tech in their latest version of the barcode reader in their iOS app too.
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|11 years ago|reply
(If you don't feel like visiting TechCrunch.)
Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.
If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case, why pay extra for AMZN's service?
I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a hard drive periodically.
There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?
[+] [-] zoul|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmathai|11 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-pho...
[2] https://github.com/photo
[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...
[4] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...
edit: added link #4
[+] [-] leejoramo|11 years ago|reply
> Amazon talks about ways of accessing photos, but does not include an API, or even RSS. Why?? What a waste.
https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/529637391951495168
I have looked at so many photo services and nothing is providing the tools or sustainable business plan that I am looking for.
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping, so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.
[+] [-] k2enemy|11 years ago|reply
I know what you mean. Lately I've gotten the impression that companies aren't offering photo storage as a feature to entice more people to use their services, but that they want our photos for some reason. Maybe advances in image recognition let them use the photos to mine marketable data?
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/storepage/storePageId=page-...
[+] [-] MrSlo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chevalier|11 years ago|reply
With OneDrive and Amazon offering unlimited storage, it can't be long until Google and Dropbox (whose clients actually work) offer the same. But Google had better step up soon. I really don't see why I should continue to pay for GDrive when Amazon bundles unlimited storage with my already-essential Prime membership.
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Justsignedup|11 years ago|reply
$8.25 a month to get unlimited photo storage. It does not, however, give you ability to share albums, just individual files. Which makes it meh, since I can't share entire albums with people, which is what I'd want to do if I upload all my photos.
[+] [-] darkstar999|11 years ago|reply
Or "free" if you already had Prime. I can't see anyone signing up for it just for this new service.
[+] [-] simonsarris|11 years ago|reply
I have been looking for a way to easily offsite backup my photos without adding another row in my "cost of being alive"[1] spreadsheet (which already contains Prime). I don't need to access them, it doesn't have to be fancy, I just want to keep them safe at a second location.
[1] Add up all the monthly/yearly services you pay for so that if you did literally nothing at all, that's the amount you'd be charged per month. Things like github, prime, linode, gym, parking permit, ACM membership, etc. That's your cost to just be alive (before choosing to consume anything).
[+] [-] kin|11 years ago|reply
Eventually I'm going to be using so many Prime services that I'll never want to cancel it.
[+] [-] wmeredith|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|11 years ago|reply
I've got it running on my desktop at home; I've got gigs and gigs of photos there. My macbook doesn't have enough free disk space to store all of them - and Crashplan doesn't let me store and sync just the 2014 photos.
[+] [-] ja27|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] general_failure|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gordon_freeman|11 years ago|reply
Also speaking strictly about the services I tried -- -- started using free Dropbox with camera uploads and with all friends referrals increased upto 10 GBs which is ultimately not good enough when you auto-upload images from phone camera. -- Then started using Flickr with 1 TB which does not have desktop client for simple drag-and-drop. -- Inconveniently tried using Google Drive on-and-off but simply cumbersome.
Seems as a Primer subscriber, I will find this service valuable for auto-camera upload.
[+] [-] vidarh|11 years ago|reply
Gmail could do that because "nobody" stored much e-mail. They could be on the case that most people would acquire more archived e-mail at a rate low enough that storage costs would drop quickly enough to cover a large percentage of the growth. In the end it also wasn't all that big deal when it came to customer acquisition: The major competitors all followed after they realised that it wouldn't drive their costs up all that much.
Pictures are different. They are already big. And everyone have lots of pictures. The main reason for signing up for cloud storage for pictures is that you have too many of them to store on your phone/tablet/other small devices, while for e-mail features, and network effects (all those people that knows your e-mail address) mattered far more than storage (consider that e.g. Yahoo charged to upgrade to 50MB or 100MB storage before Gmail, and almost nobody did - the free amount was sufficient for most users).
This is viable for Amazon because Prime customers are highly valuable and 1) we pay, 2) retaining us is worth lots of money - I've been up to over 200 orders a year from Amazon some years, 3) Amazon by now has years of experience driving down the cost of image storage, 4) it helps as a way of driving customers to their Fire platform (e.g. photos and videos in the Amazon cloud account show up on the Fire TV)
[+] [-] cbhl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredmcdonald|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otoburb|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rada|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caublestone|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|11 years ago|reply
So just like politicians roll out the pork before Election Day, Amazon is giving us all sorts of wonderful things to keep Prime around into the new year. (Example: the TV stick that doesn't ship until mid January)
[+] [-] derengel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cplease|11 years ago|reply
Copy looks promising. If you're willing to pay you use a service like rsync.net, or if you're willing to do a bit of setup you can just use any old shared hosting or VPS service. Or owncloud for some sugar.
[+] [-] mhd|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikecarlton|11 years ago|reply
And they've got an api https://help.yahoo.com/kb/flickr/difference-free-free-flickr...
[+] [-] hashtree|11 years ago|reply
Works nicely to get the most of your iOS device storage, share with family, mild private social interactions (e.g. commenting), OSX integration (e.g. you can have one central repo for wallpapers for all devices), etc.
[+] [-] gutnor|11 years ago|reply
I'm wondering if Dropbox has something in store ? Seems to me like they will need something soon to justify their premium prices.
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s3r3nity|11 years ago|reply
Good move on Amazon's part to compete - not sure how Dropbox and the like will keep up with this movement towards free unlimited storage.
[+] [-] swartkrans|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rscott|11 years ago|reply