'Family Vault' Lets Amazon Prime Members Share Free Photo Storage

[MacRumors]

Amazon today launched a new Prime Photos feature called "Family Vault", which extends the unlimited photo storage that Amazon Prime subscribers get to their friends and family members (via TechCrunch).

For those unfamiliar with Amazon Prime, a $99 per year subscription includes free two-day shipping, unlimited streaming of movies, TV shows and music, and unlimited photo storage, among other benefits. With the arrival of Family Vault, Prime subscribers can now invite up to five family members or friends to join their online account, where they can combine photos and each get another 5GB of storage for uploading videos and other files.

The thinking behind Family Vault is to allow close friends and families to see each other's photos and videos in a single location, and be able to access them on their own devices, at no cost to those added by the Prime account holder.

The Family Plan announcement also ushers in some new search technology for Prime Photos users, including keyword-related searches for photos with a specific theme or subject (e.g. cat, wedding, beach, and so on) and a face-finding feature called "People".

Amazon is also formally announcing a new low-cost photo printing service, with prints starting at 9 cents, with free shipping for Prime members.

Further details of all of the company's newly announced features can be found on Amazon's Photos minisite or through the Amazon Photos mobile app.

Article Link: 'Family Vault' Lets Amazon Prime Members Share Free Photo Storage

 

[MacConvert07]

Prime is looking better and better by the month. Look out apple! You are in danger of being left further behind in the race to the cloud. (I say that as I recently upgraded to both Apple Music and a paid tier of iCloud storage. Interesting.)

How about free shipping from the Apple Store for paid tier levels on iCloud? Or a free Apple Music subscription? That would be nice.

 

[Phil A.]

Looks like this is a US only feature - would be nice if they'd roll it out to the rest of the world

 

[chr1s60]

I can't speak for countries other than the US, but having been a Prime member for about a decade now, it is by far one of the best investments one can make. It used to pay for itself in just shipping costs alone and over the past 5 years it has continually gotten better. I don't see them losing me as a customer any time soon.

 

[autumnpatchouli]

Amazon Prime Photos, which I've used since it was available, was basically an afterthought bonus to Prime members. That said, it is now superior to Apple photos. Apple just can't seem to get photos right. I use it as my photo entry point, which is then farmed automatically out to Prime, Google photos, Flickr, & One Drive. All, with maybe the exception of One Drive, are better at what they do than Apple photos. The facial recognition not being synced between devices (last time I looked) is ridiculous. Search is inferior. And every system update seems to screw up photos in some way. Add to that the fact I pay $900 for their phone, and get a paltry 5gb of cloud storage. So I have to bother with $.99 a month for 45gb more.i do love Apple phones, but this company nickels & dimes you to death on their services.

 

[Wayfarer]

Amazon is becoming the new Google.

 

[rhoydotp]

I only wish they would start working on being able to read/show the preview of RAW files.

Other than that, it's not bad additional feature of being a Prime member ...

oh yeah, how about extending these services and other services not available in Canada.

 

[chr1s60]

Amazon is becoming the new Google.

How so? I think what they are doing is brilliant and likely making them a lot of money. They took a service that started as nothing more than focusing on people that do a lot of online shopping and have slowly expanded the services included to help gain them more and more users and all without eliminating perks for the most part. You could join Prime for any single one of the main features and the price is pretty reasonable for a year just for that service, but they know by throwing the others in they will keep you in the Amazon ecosystem (shopping, music, photo, video) as a one stop shop. In a sense it is much more like Apple running everything through iCloud and iTunes than it is like Google. The only place Amazon has struggled is with actual tech hardware, not including the Kindle.

 

[Boatboy24]

Need to look further into this. I started using Prime photo a few months ago. My wife and I share a Prime account. I wrote to Amazon at the time asking if there was a way you could set up 'folders' for different users, as I don't want to mix her photos with mine. Looks like this just might do that.

 

[5105973]

I did not even realize Amazon Prime had this service. I guess I just skipped past it somehow. I use ICloud and Google Drive and Google Photos. I certainly don't object to using an additional service seeing as I'm already paying for it.

What I don't like about Apple's "stuff" is that except for Music, I can't really think of anything they have that is cross platform. I know they want to lock you into their ecosystem but it just annoys me to the point I am breaking out of the ecosystem every way I can.

 

[maflynn]

Amazon is becoming the new Google.

yes, and I'd say at this point they may be out-googling google.

 

[macduke]

I've been wanting Apple to do this with iCloud storage. I pay for 1TB/mo and only have 205GB on there (I recently had to upgrade because I kept bumping up against the 200GB limit and kept having to delete videos). So I have about 800GB free and can't even share it with my wife—even though we share apps, movies, TV shows, games, Apple Music, etc—I have to buy her a separate storage account. IDK why it can't be shared among everyone in the family like literally everything else including location, notes, reminders, and calendars. As the head of the family I should be able to allocate space to each user, as well as share certain folders. I hope Apple is working on this functionality!

 

[maxsix]

What I don't like about Apple's "stuff" is that except for Music, I can't really think of anything they have that is cross platform. I know they want to lock you into their ecosystem but it just annoys me to the point I am breaking out of the ecosystem every way I can.

So very true. The irony is I began enjoying Apples finest work years ago, yet today one must accept great limitations to do so.
[doublepost=1476797879][/doublepost]

I've been wanting Apple to do this with iCloud storage. I pay for 1TB/mo and only have 205GB on there (I recently had to upgrade because I kept bumping up against the 200GB limit and kept having to delete videos). So I have about 800GB free and can't even share it with my wife—even though we share apps, movies, TV shows, games, Apple Music, etc—I have to buy her a separate storage account. IDK why it can't be shared among everyone in the family like literally everything else including location, notes, reminders, and calendars. As the head of the family I should be able to allocate space to each user, as well as share certain folders. I hope Apple is working on this functionality!

Apples obsession as a controlling dictator overrides common sense.

 

[rvinny]

and yet still no prime app for AppleTV

 

[BigMcGuire]

I take thousands of photos per month. I usually copy/paste them to our Telegram family messenger into our family chat (which has thousands and thousands of media files). This is actually pretty cool. I've had Prime since they've started it and always used Prime Photos as a "backup" to Google Photos. With this, we can all share our photos in one massive "vault" - that interests me considerably.

The Amazon Photos app has REALLY matured and added a ton of Google Photos like features (facial recognition, past photos taken x years ago today, etc...

Yes, Google Photos has this feature but not an option to Automatically upload to the family vault - that's kinda cool.

We all use iPhones and it's really sad that iCloud Photos hasn't advanced with the times.
[doublepost=1476800755][/doublepost]

and yet still no prime app for AppleTV

Yeah, kinda sucks but to be honest, it hasn't stopped my wife and I. We'll either airplay it to Apple TV with iPads/iPhones or to my ChromeCast via my Android tablet. Wife has to watch her Mozart in the Jungle!

 

[aajeevlin]

I've been wanting Apple to do this with iCloud storage. I pay for 1TB/mo and only have 205GB on there (I recently had to upgrade because I kept bumping up against the 200GB limit and kept having to delete videos). So I have about 800GB free and can't even share it with my wife—even though we share apps, movies, TV shows, games, Apple Music, etc—I have to buy her a separate storage account. IDK why it can't be shared among everyone in the family like literally everything else including location, notes, reminders, and calendars. As the head of the family I should be able to allocate space to each user, as well as share certain folders. I hope Apple is working on this functionality!

I completely agree with you. I'm okay with the 5GB free storage and all that. I'm also okay with paying $10/month for their storage solution. But come on, at least allow up to several family memory to share the storage space. Until now, I have mostly stayed away from any Apple storage solution when it comes to photos. I don't use iCloud for any photo backup, mostly relying on One drive and Google photos, to store and to quickly share photos with my wife.

 

[macduke]

I completely agree with you. I'm okay with the 5GB free storage and all that. I'm also okay with paying $10/month for their storage solution. But come on, at least allow up to several family memory to share the storage space. Until now, I have mostly stayed away from any Apple storage solution when it comes to photos. I don't use iCloud for any photo backup, mostly relying on One drive and Google photos, to store and to quickly share photos with my wife.

Yeah, what I like about iCloud is that it does it all automatically without me having to fiddle with opening up secondary apps and leave them open so they can sync in the background. They show up relatively quickly on my other devices, without me having to open a separate app and wait for them to load on all my other devices. My wife's iCloud storage is only $0.99/mo because she doesn't take as many photos and videos as I do, but now that she has an SE I'm sure those 12mp live photos and 4K videos are going to start eating it up like they did when I got my 6s last year. It's also more convenient to have it all under one account.

This really wouldn't be so bad if Apple still offered the $4.99/mo 500GB storage option. I wish I was grandfathered in on that plan! But back then I was barely filling up 100GB of my 200GB plan, so it seemed like a waste.

If Apple allowed constant background tasks for things like Dropbox AND allowed them to show up in the Photos app, then I would probably switch back to doing that. It's cheaper, more flexible, but more of a pain to manage because of needing to open the app and let it sync everything from my camera roll. Not having everything available to Photos is also a big downside now that iOS 10 lets you search your photos using facial recognition and neural networks to identify objects in photos. I guess that's less of an issue for Google users, but I refuse to give Google my personal photos and metadata information for my own personal privacy reasons. I also like the memories feature in the Photos app, which my wife and I have actually been consistently using to watch clips of our kids and trips on our Apple TV.

 

[iSRS]

I've been wanting Apple to do this with iCloud storage. I pay for 1TB/mo and only have 205GB on there (I recently had to upgrade because I kept bumping up against the 200GB limit and kept having to delete videos). So I have about 800GB free and can't even share it with my wife—even though we share apps, movies, TV shows, games, Apple Music, etc—I have to buy her a separate storage account. IDK why it can't be shared among everyone in the family like literally everything else including location, notes, reminders, and calendars. As the head of the family I should be able to allocate space to each user, as well as share certain folders. I hope Apple is working on this functionality!

Me too! This looks like exactly what I want, and will stop the "nudging" from my wife that she need the pictures off her iPhone and the kids' iPhones added to Photos so she can print them.

This is the perfect all in one solution. Bravo, Amazon, bravo...

One Question: Do the family members have unlimited photo uploads and the 5GB is limited to video and other files? This is how I understand it. Looking to see if anyone knows for sure.

As far as an Amazon Prime app for the Apple TV? I've given up hope. And since trying to find a non-smart TV in 2016 was a near impossibility, isn't an issue for me any longer...

 

[aajeevlin]

Me too! This looks like exactly what I want, and will stop the "nudging" from my wife that she need the pictures off her iPhone and the kids' iPhones added to Photos so she can print them.

This is the perfect all in one solution. Bravo, Amazon, bravo...

One Question: Do the family members have unlimited photo uploads and the 5GB is limited to video and other files? This is how I understand it. Looking to see if anyone knows for sure.

As far as an Amazon Prime app for the Apple TV? I've given up hope. And since trying to find a non-smart TV in 2016 was a near impossibility, isn't an issue for me any longer...

For photo sharing I use one drive and just share my entire camera roll with my wife. She does the same as well. So after a trip or just whenever I need a photo from her I can just go grab it myself.