Prime is reaching a primarily-digital-services point that I half-expect them to split-off the free-shipping 'benefit' into another package, or quietly drop it.
Actually I wish they would, so that I could check-out physical orders twice as fast without the tedium of deselecting the defaulted 'Yes give me the 30-day Prime trial!' checkboxes. It is quite odious how much upselling they now load into the checkout process.
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.
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.
> 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?
I wonder how much effort it would be to subject the images to some simple and reversible transform to foil that sort of thing. (e.g., extract every odd-numbered pixel to its own layer, rotate it by 180 degrees, and merge.)
I think it's simpler than this; they want to fully utilize their compute resources so they can squeeze suppliers for better prices. If Amazon can get a one cent discount on hard drives by buying more, then Amazon.com is cheaper to run.
There is no excuse for not offering this to Canadian Prime subscribers. We get absolutely nothing out of that subscription, but faster shipping. I will cancel my Prime membership out of principle if they don't give us this one.
Legitimate question: I wonder what their definition of a "photo" is? For example do they support RAW files? Or is it only JPG/PNG? On that subject I wonder if even BMP is supported.
That should be quite simple to test. Just generate a bunch of random images and start uploading. Let us know when they ban you, and declare you the enemy of the state.
I can't seem to find anywhere whether they include free video storage as well. I realize there are limitation on video size, but I have thousands of short videos that fit their limitations.
It's actually somewhat unclear. They say that they support ".raw" files, but that suffix is only used for raw files from Kyocera Contax and Panasonic cameras. They specifically don't list .NEF (Nikon), .CR2 / .CRW (Canon), or .DNG (the "standardized" raw file format).
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.
This was going to be my question. It says it supports .RAW, but does that mean it supports RAW files in general (i.e. CR2, ARW, NEF, etc.)?
If so, this is a huge thing for me. I've been looking for somewhere to back up 2TB of RAW files for a long time, but there's nothing out there that's affordable/trustworthy enough that i've found.
Would be curious to hear if they're using some sort of authentication for the client (ie. private key) as a way to bottleneck that. Would suck to have to relay everything through a smartphone for now... but there's always a better way.
I believe it's either phone OR drag/drop into a browser from a desktop, so just no client side Amazon app at the moment, maybe to keep everyone from installing it and setting it to backup everything on the initial launch.
EDIT: Nevermind, I'm now reading your comment less as "only smartphone available" and more as "use the smart phone app as a proxy"
Honestly, I'd rather Dropbox keep its 1TB plan and make it cheaper. I pay $9.99 a month for it and use it pretty much only for photo storage; it will be years before I fill it up even halfway.
Just don't delete any local files because they don't remain in Dropbox. Crashplan will keep locally deleted files forever. Backblaze only keeps them for 30 days, and Dropbox removes them immediately (you can access them for 30 days via deleted file history, 1yr if you pony up more cash, but the business plan keeps them indefinitely)
I agree with wanting the 1TB option to be cheaper, but I'm finding fewer uses for Dropbox unless I switch to the business plan, which doesn't make sense. However for a family, you get 5 users for 15/mo and unlimited space. I'm still trying to figure out the downside to the business plan.
I want to see pressure to provide a better photo service. (API's, organizational tools, sharing, privacy controls,etc) All we are getting is a race to the bottom and worse services.
You might be interested in Smugmug. They hit all of those and have a simple and affordable pricing model. $40/yr unlimited storage. No gimmicks. Really good privacy controls.
just did a quick look. I evaluated Smugmug a few years ago, but decided it didn't quite meet my needs. But it looks like i should give the service a serious review again.
And I see that they have support for RSS and other feeds which might work for some of the integrations I want to do.
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 had the same experience and I hated it. Although, a friend sent a book to me from that list on my birthday but overall it is a disconcerting experience.
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.
Nope, their mobile app is used as a file manager for your backups.
Crashplan has a desktop app that backs up your photos indefinitely though. It backups your external devices as well, been using them for years and I can't tell you how many times it's saved me.
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.
Does it do selective sync? e.g., HOME:/media/pictures contains folders for 2014...etc, and LAPTOP:/media/pictures/ only contains 2014, and any changes to LAPTOP:/media/pictures/2014/ get propagated to HOME:/media/pictures/2014 etc?
Unlike Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft, OneDrive doesn't seem to sync a folder on my PC. You have to manually drag files and folders to upload them. But free (I already have Prime) is a good price to backup my 500GB of photos.
Are you saying that the Amazon Cloud Drive client is allowing to access files on the cloud, that are not synchronized to your machine? If that is the case, this is a first, and it is great to hear!
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 are several JavaScript projects that aim to let you connect your own storage from a varity of locations. They are still pretty early on in development, though.
It's not a standardized API but you can use Lightroom plug-ins such as jfriedl's to "publish" to a variety of different sites. That said, this approach is more oriented toward uploading a curated and edited subset than your photos in bulk.
On that topic, I suppose that I'm going to have to think about how much curation I should do for the multimedia that I keep at all. I'm backing up about 1.5TB to cloud storage and that's at or over the limit of what I really have the network bandwidth to reasonably deal with. And I know that most of what's backed up could be easily deleted--but it would take time to do that curation.
I was considering going after this as well, as none of the cloud storage providers would build an intuitive app to offer multiple backends that let you move away from their own.
A small budget for a v1 desktop & mobile app that gracefully removed all this fuzziness could disrupt this 'store your photos here!' war between giants, using their own cloud file storage products. However that's when the transfer rates become switching costs...
But I do believe photo storage is worth a premium over file storage
specifically:
Photos are of family;
Family is cherished;
some people would run into burning buildings to save family photo albums...
Awesome! Congratulations! Thank you for sharing your journey. How has it worked out going for business customers?
Let me know if/when you want to go back to consumers. A lot has changed in 4 years and I think you hit the nail on the head with some of your previous comments. In the current environment, many people are comparing the next hard drive purchase vs cloud storage purchase. I don't believe that was the case 1 year ago.
That was before the iOS 'Your cloud storage is full' alert started scaring mothers and grandmothers everywhere in thinking their photos will be gone forever!.
That was before the (..possible) facebook decline (but my photos are there!!)
you've got a headstart on me, but features I want:
Let me be an Admin and control which cloud provider i'm going to pay for. I'll set up the vendor accounts as needed/recommended by your newsletter.
Let my Wife, Mother, Father, Mother-in-law do the uploading and sharing - seamlessly as they would with their other apps as I change hosting providers behind the scenes for them as I feel the need. the most basic of UI needed for them. - think an app they could launch to see 'All Backed-up' or 'Backing up now'
i loved the idea, but stopped using it around the time of the name change - for some reason the login stopped working for me in Opera, and that was enough friction for me to give up on it
Sorry you had troubles logging in. But thanks for using it.
To your point, the idea is/was great but if it wasn't good enough that you stopped using it because of a login issue that emphasizes my point.
I agree it's a great idea and other have had it before me and obviously still continue today. I don't believe it's something you can scale a large business from.
There are S3 and Swift (OpenStack storage) which can be used through standardized APIs. Storage in both standards is offered by many independent providers.
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 have one issue with Picturelife: it doesn't adhere to folder structure. A more minor one would be folder monitoring on iOS, but I can set something up with IFTTT to work around that.
Aside from that the service is wonderful and I'm really coming around to it. I want them to succeed and I hope they do.
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.
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).
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.
Yes, but for how long? What if my credit card expires and I forget to update it? Is there a 30 day grace period for downloading them or are they wiped immediately?
I am trying to determine if this can be used for video storage as well. The documentation does not make that clear but it does state "rules" on video uploads in terms of length, file format and size.
I am actually ok with it. As a house hold, we have one prime account, then we do the prime family share. So now everyone has unlimited storage in the house. Nice.
As a new dad living away from my family, here's what I want:
1. cheap storage. I'm willing to pay $5 for 100GB.
2. don't muck around with my pictures. I have a nice camera.
3. don't copy all of the pictures on my account to all my devices, I'm trying to free up storage, not consume it.
4. let me setup a slideshow on my TV easily. I have (multiple) game consoles hooked up (that have web browsers). I have a Chromecast. Music + pictures = instant emotional win! Just let me pick an album "start slideshow" and put on some cheesy music automatically.
5. Let me easily share albums with family/friends, and let them access the pictures easily
Right now Picasa + Google Plus is the closest. The one thing is that there is no good way to get a slideshow going on my TV. This is actually a big deal to me. I have a Chromecast and all the major game consoles connected to my TV - and there's still no good solution. OneDrive on Xbox One gets pretty close for TV slideshows, but then I have to upload an album specifically to OneDrive - which actually isn't too bad. But it's still cumbersome to get a slideshow with music going and because Xbox One doesn't do background music I have 1/4 of the screen taken up:
* load up music app
* find something to fit the "mood" which is annoying to do on Xbox Music
Yup, I've been using that - but it's not really a slideshow. Each picture is visible for 20+ seconds, and there's no music. I haven't tested if you play music that the backdrop is still visible though.
Google+ and Chromecast are like 85% of the way there. I just want to open up the Google+ app on my phone, go to an album and "cast slideshow" and have that be a great experience. Right now it's horrible.
If someone were providing this service at scale they'd get better pricing that $3 for 100GB. But you're somewhat right that the margins here are pretty thin - which is probably why the people that are providing the infrastructure are also providing the service (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). The margins are going to be higher for them, so it's going to be very hard for a startup to compete.
Part of this may be due to the fact that they are not trying to attract businesses with this change. In fact, the terms of service say that you cannot use this offer if it's for commercial purposes. I agree that an API would be very nice though.
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?
It already does, it's called Cloud Drive (and Zocalo). They might still end up snagging some users with this, but that doesn't take away from the possibility that they're using the info for advertising.
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."
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.
Why would you cancel your Prime Subscription to begin with? As someone who gets more than the price of Prime on shipping items alone, all these additional services are just bonuses to what is already an insanely cost-effective subscription.
You can pay for a lot of two-day shipping with $100 a year. I don't want all these dubious "value-add" services, like Prime Instant Video, Kindle Library, Prime Music, and now this photo storage service.
I'm pretty sure I get $100/year worth of 2 day shipping out of Prime quite easily, but I'm starting to agree on the other points.
What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3 or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited shipments.
Prime packages are treated better than Express; tracked better and always delivered. In my PO nothing is more important. A misthrow of a media mail or regular parcel gets delivered the next day (misthrow = put in the wrong hamper and not noticed until the truck gets loaded; the correct carrier has left); whereas if a Prime parcel is a misthrow, they send one of the "gargoyles" (i.e. newly minted temporary $16.50 hr workers) to deliver it that day.
Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.
USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed
True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]
If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
> If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered, particularly for USPS.
What if they need to price hike the service again? Also losing tax incentives in many states starts to swing the value proposition, but features like this will raise it.
Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.
While I agree with you 100% I think that this isn't a very good argument against lock-in. i.e what if Amazon pricing model changes making it not cost effective, or what if they start limiting their services or what if a better service crops up and Amazon cannot compete etc...
Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.
There's always the possibility that you won't necessarily always want to direct so much of your shopping on Amazon as to recoup that Prime cost. A new player may enter or a current one change such that price, selection, service, etc. makes it more compelling to direct more of your commerce through them. There is also the possibility that Amazon itself changes to be less attractive as a commerce option.
This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.
- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price
- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping
Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.
Since we share it across my family, sure we would likely keep the $100/yr, even on the few purchases a month we make. I have occasionally used Prime video, but wouldn't shed a tear if we had to give it up. I can't name a single other thing I would consistently use from Prime.
More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.
If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).
Don't forget that shipping is still free if you are willing to batch your purchases so that they total at least $35. Amazon also ding non-prime members on shipping speed.
Not everybody is you. We let our Prime subscription lapse as we don't buy enough stuff from Amazon to justify it. This photos offering has my wife reconsidering rather strongly.
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.
Not least because the pictures are available on the Fire TV, so if you plug in a Fire TV in the living room you better not have any pictures in your Amazon Cloud Drive that you don't want anyone that gets to use your Fire TV to see.
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).
It's unlikely that I'd use this as my only means of photo storage. I will, however, use it to supplement iCloud and Backblaze.
Yes, there should be some underlying universal API for data storage like this. But, in the meantime, I feel that tying myself to a single provider might bite me in the ass.
If you exceed the limit of your current storage plan, you won’t be able to upload additional content but you'll still be able to view, download and delete your files, photos, and personal videos for at least three months.
During this time you can:
...Renew or sign-up for Amazon Prime to enjoy the Prime Photos benefit...
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.
I think the only great thing remains about Dropbox is their awesome sync. But think biggies like Google,MS,Apple,etc. will soon catch up with it with sync service on par with Dropbox. Dropbox will need to come up with something to justify its being.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 967 ms ] threadActually I wish they would, so that I could check-out physical orders twice as fast without the tedium of deselecting the defaulted 'Yes give me the 30-day Prime trial!' checkboxes. It is quite odious how much upselling they now load into the checkout process.
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.
http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/storepage/storePageId=page-...
http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/helppricing
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?
Source: Contacted Amazon.ca
.bmp .gif .jpeg .jpg .png .raw .tif .tiff
For videos:
.mp4 (including mov, 3gp, m4v) .avi (including divx) .mts (mpeg transport stream) .mpg (mpeg program stream) .asf/.wmv .flv .ogg
The restrictions can be found at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
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.
You can only use a mobile app or the web interface to drag and drop files...
If so, this is a huge thing for me. I've been looking for somewhere to back up 2TB of RAW files for a long time, but there's nothing out there that's affordable/trustworthy enough that i've found.
EDIT: Nevermind, I'm now reading your comment less as "only smartphone available" and more as "use the smart phone app as a proxy"
I agree with wanting the 1TB option to be cheaper, but I'm finding fewer uses for Dropbox unless I switch to the business plan, which doesn't make sense. However for a family, you get 5 users for 15/mo and unlimited space. I'm still trying to figure out the downside to the business plan.
And I see that they have support for RSS and other feeds which might work for some of the integrations I want to do.
$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.
Or "free" if you already had Prime. I can't see anyone signing up for it just for this new service.
Crashplan has a desktop app that backs up your photos indefinitely though. It backups your external devices as well, been using them for years and I can't tell you how many times it's saved me.
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.
The flow is directories on your machine > BackBlaze.
Anything in the other direction is manual.
Backup: Comp #1 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #2 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #6 (Out of State Mother Inlaws (Selected) -> HomeNAS
Work Flow Any Comp working on files from NAS (Not local)
1. http://remotestorage.io/
2. http://cloud-rail.com/
3. https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS
Disclosure: I maintain byoFS.
[1] http://remotestorage.io/
On that topic, I suppose that I'm going to have to think about how much curation I should do for the multimedia that I keep at all. I'm backing up about 1.5TB to cloud storage and that's at or over the limit of what I really have the network bandwidth to reasonably deal with. And I know that most of what's backed up could be easily deleted--but it would take time to do that curation.
A small budget for a v1 desktop & mobile app that gracefully removed all this fuzziness could disrupt this 'store your photos here!' war between giants, using their own cloud file storage products. However that's when the transfer rates become switching costs...
But I do believe photo storage is worth a premium over file storage specifically: Photos are of family; Family is cherished; some people would run into burning buildings to save family photo albums...
is now the time?
[1] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...
[2] https://github.com/photo
[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...
Let me know if/when you want to go back to consumers. A lot has changed in 4 years and I think you hit the nail on the head with some of your previous comments. In the current environment, many people are comparing the next hard drive purchase vs cloud storage purchase. I don't believe that was the case 1 year ago.
That was before the iOS 'Your cloud storage is full' alert started scaring mothers and grandmothers everywhere in thinking their photos will be gone forever!.
That was before the (..possible) facebook decline (but my photos are there!!)
you've got a headstart on me, but features I want:
Let me be an Admin and control which cloud provider i'm going to pay for. I'll set up the vendor accounts as needed/recommended by your newsletter.
Let my Wife, Mother, Father, Mother-in-law do the uploading and sharing - seamlessly as they would with their other apps as I change hosting providers behind the scenes for them as I feel the need. the most basic of UI needed for them. - think an app they could launch to see 'All Backed-up' or 'Backing up now'
I wouldn't prioritize cropping, tagging, 'liking', emailing, sharing, communicating, friending, etc
Best of luck!
To your point, the idea is/was great but if it wasn't good enough that you stopped using it because of a login issue that emphasizes my point.
I agree it's a great idea and other have had it before me and obviously still continue today. I don't believe it's something you can scale a large business from.
Expect other cloud providers to follow suit:
"Use our unlimited (and slow) storage if you'll sign up to use our crappy (device|app|service)".
Don't expect:
"Use our unlimited storage for (free|low fee) from anywhere".
http://www.expandrive.com/
[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
And I'm feeling really bad for picturelife right now.
Aside from that the service is wonderful and I'm really coming around to it. I want them to succeed and I hope they do.
I'm not affiliated with the developer, just a big fan.
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.
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).
> 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.
1. cheap storage. I'm willing to pay $5 for 100GB.
2. don't muck around with my pictures. I have a nice camera.
3. don't copy all of the pictures on my account to all my devices, I'm trying to free up storage, not consume it.
4. let me setup a slideshow on my TV easily. I have (multiple) game consoles hooked up (that have web browsers). I have a Chromecast. Music + pictures = instant emotional win! Just let me pick an album "start slideshow" and put on some cheesy music automatically.
5. Let me easily share albums with family/friends, and let them access the pictures easily
Right now Picasa + Google Plus is the closest. The one thing is that there is no good way to get a slideshow going on my TV. This is actually a big deal to me. I have a Chromecast and all the major game consoles connected to my TV - and there's still no good solution. OneDrive on Xbox One gets pretty close for TV slideshows, but then I have to upload an album specifically to OneDrive - which actually isn't too bad. But it's still cumbersome to get a slideshow with music going and because Xbox One doesn't do background music I have 1/4 of the screen taken up:
* load up music app
* find something to fit the "mood" which is annoying to do on Xbox Music
* go to one drive
* navigate to album
* start slideshow
* snap xbox music
Google+ and Chromecast are like 85% of the way there. I just want to open up the Google+ app on my phone, go to an album and "cast slideshow" and have that be a great experience. Right now it's horrible.
Well there's the issue. S3 rates are $3 for 100GB, which leaves $2/mo to provide the value-added services you enumerate.
You'd need 5k monthly subscribers just to hire 1 engineer.
Agree. anything 'included with prime' lately makes me think its really to better understand & sell to primers, rather than gain new ones.
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."
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-p...
Acquiring new customers is always significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers.
What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3 or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited shipments.
Anybody else had similar experiences?
Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.
USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed
True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]
If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);
Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered, particularly for USPS.
Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.
Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.
This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.
- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price
- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping
Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.
More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.
If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).
I believe this is the same tech in their latest version of the barcode reader in their iOS app too.
Yes, there should be some underlying universal API for data storage like this. But, in the meantime, I feel that tying myself to a single provider might bite me in the ass.
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/s4NwAs1.png
edit: False alarm, seems to be limited to 10GB.
If you exceed the limit of your current storage plan, you won’t be able to upload additional content but you'll still be able to view, download and delete your files, photos, and personal videos for at least three months.
During this time you can: ...Renew or sign-up for Amazon Prime to enjoy the Prime Photos benefit...
I'm wondering if Dropbox has something in store ? Seems to me like they will need something soon to justify their premium prices.