I'm probably stating the obvious / pics on smartphone

... and I downloaded the app for the laptop, but only for the $10 credit, I use Amazon a lot so I'll take the free $10. Went through the process and uploaded 4 photos, although to get the $10 you only need to upload one photo.

That said I probably won't use it very often, even though I take literally hundreds of photos a month. I have a portable 1TB hard drive I keep my photos on. Transferring them from my Galaxy S10 is easy as pie and I keep control of my photos, who knows what Amazon might use them for, I didn't read the "contract".

There is one possibility I could see it good for though. Hotlinking your photos on forums like I used to do with Photobucket for years before they became a paid service out of the blue and left a lot of forums with no photos where they used to be in threads.

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Went ahead and moved 12k pics to amazon lol so if there's a downside I'm pretty much *******! lol

Feels like freedom, I see that when I take a pic it uploads if on wifi. the name of the game is it costs $0, whereas Apple says to add storage for $x.

Also I don't trust those portable drives, never gave it any thought until I would start to have friends say they lost "everything" because they crashed. Back then I looked into RAID drives and thought man I truly don't have the space for all this hardware and would I really need RAID 1 (realistically it would have been $4xx for maybe 4 TB)? So I decided to do something a little better than a portable drive and I bought an internal 3.5" drive and enclosure.

Who knows amazon knows how to hook people so likely at some point it becomes "unfree" haha

and to show my geekability I have a never kept out of the box 1500VA APC pure sine wave UPS with the network card (set it up and put it back in the box), I think it approaches $1,000 with the NIC. Again another one of my hare brained schemes and I said I don't have the space for all this. The reason was once again, friend saying my new 2-1 didn't even work on the $300 UPS I bought from Staples, when we had a storm, I thought I could keep working on the UPS and charge my 2-1. I looked at it and said yeah dude lots of those energy star devices won't work unless your UPS is pure sine wave. Kinda defeats the purpose....

Photobucket was free for many years, most photos imbedded in posts, on forums that allow them, unlike here, were hotlinked from photobucket. Photobucket built a photobase of millions of photos and probably hundreds of thousands of users.

Then one day photobucket said we are no longer allowing hotlinks for free, in fact we are no longer allowing free storage over x-amount of MB (very small amount) for free either. They gave users a very short time to retrieve their photos before they couldn't access them anymore without paying the extortion fee.

Lots of forums had broken image links and many people lost stored photo access, unless they paid of course.

I have had an occasional hard drive failure but most of the time most of the stuff on the drive can be retrieved with a little know how and the right program. Today there are solid state drives, no moving parts, they may last a lot longer, still relatively on the new side to know how long. Everything has a shelf life.

Honestly though, I have easily 1000's of photos saved and have hardly ever looked at most of them a second time. My trouble is finding one that fits a topic I want to post, that I know I have, but can't find among countless folders I have stored.

Oh, and don't forget, the "Cloud" is a hard drive somewhere, it can crash as well.

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The "Cloud" uses multi raid arrays using many, many disks. Also, most data is backed up nightly to a remote site. Loss of data is reduced to a minimal chance for the average consumer user.

Sounds like you need a DAM - digital asset management software. The possibility of losing your photos in the cloud (due to crashes) is almost non existent with redundancy in place. We're talking about data centers. Your photos are likely stored in many redundant places (redundant storage and computers, multiple locations). You'll more likely lose your data in a hack.

Okay. I'll give it a try. I'll download the Desktop version and send up a nice picture of my feet or something exciting. I use Amazon a lot. I did read the terms and the discount is ONLY for items "sold by Amazon". Not sold by a third party and not "fulfilled by Amazon". Not a problem.

I don't normally take a lot of pics and don't backup to the cloud. I have an external drive that has my stuff on it. I'll do the "one pic" requirement and let it go at that.

phranc & chewbacca

Thanks for the info folks.

It's interesting we tend to think of data storage as nearly free. Like picking up a 2TB hard drive for $49. That's a huge amount of storage, I think my laptops which are the old SSDs are only 512 gb. ONLY. lol

I think my pics off my phone were almost 30 gb. And amazon has an unlimited photo storage for free. Even to the world's richest man, this has a retail value of at least $12/yr. The thing is it's unlimited as in no limits. Imagine if I had a 512 gb phone now it's $96/yr retail. Maybe there being a catch in the future is likely.

I still go back to Photobucket, started out completely free no limit, then after many years they charged a very small amount for over a set limit, I forget what it was but for most folks the free would work, I paid the $10 I think it was. Did that for a few years and then they wanted some ridiculous amount, guessing don't recall exactly, but let's say $499 for the same space that was originally free, then $10. After a short window your photos were locked in their cloud, unless you paid to use the service. Fortunately I had my many thousands of photos backed up on one of my many ultra slim 1 TB hard drives.

Amazon is about making money, I can't help but see them go the same route if the app catches on.

I do not believe in storing my "whatever" in a cloud or other similar storage.
My HDD is always formatted to two partitions. But I also have a 1 TB external HDD which still has lots of room available. This HDD is only in use when I want to copy something to or from it. At all other times it is turned off and will probably outlive myself.

... although I have several portable USB hard drives ranging from 500GB to 2TB. Most of my photos are on more than one of those drives. As mentioned previously, I take a lot of photos (since phones started having cameras) and most I'll never look at again, but I have them if I want to. I frequent many different types of online forum similar to the POI factory except they allow you to place images in your posts. For most of those you need to hotlink the photo from somewhere else, for that purpose I have photos stored in a cloud somewhere, to get a link to the photo to use in a post. But again, it's not the only place that photo exists. A lot of folks lost a lot of photos because of the photobucket fiasco, I wasn't one of them.

Case in point, Yesterday I was back at work, we were paving at the old Philadelphia Navy Yard. Now most of the Navy Yard is no longer used by the Navy and has been re-built, mostly new office buildings and it seems each one has to be more odd than the next one. A very cool place to take a ride around. They still have a few battleships too.

I took about 168 photos yesterday. The beautiful thing about digital photos is it costs you nothing if the shots don't turn out, no more wasting film so I just shoot away, if I only get a dozen or two worth keep no loss. Here's a few from the many I took.

https://i.postimg.cc/fLTYBkmC/1.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/nc8GtVJF/2.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/DwwW9R8f/3.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/nLvCBxWk/4.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/fy7Gf2N1/5.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/kG71q70h/6.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/4dsbhBWY/7.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/6qs7v3WY/8.jpg

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nice pics, wow, I dont' recognize any of that. I mean I remember one time we accidentally pulled in there going to Dead shows at the Spectrum and MP and german shepherd dogs told us to halt and we drove away (those were the days). But even 15+ years ago I used to park on Pattison for Flyers games. Amazing we gotta take a ride down there one of these days. Looks fantastic.

Yeah with film I remember being excited to get pics back and almost always being disappointed with the way they came out. And also thinking someone looked at all the pics too (remember all the story of risque pics). I always wondered how cos like Canon and Nikon seemingly easily transitioned. Leica and Kodak were left in the dust (although Leica now makes $7k digital cams).

I already got my $10 for amazon--I needed Channellocks to do a snap ring on the faucet and it's like 0.023. Mine is 0.039 surprisingly. I have like 40 different Channellocks of every kind, not circlip pliers unfortunately. The $10 took the sting off of the $24 for sure. (hate to pay the high amazon price too they're not the place to get Channellocks. Used to get them at a farm supply called Circle C for huge discounts)

Like Melaqueman, I also don't believe in using cloud storage. I have an iPhone XS with 128GB storage. This accommodates all the pics I take in a month with plenty to spare.

Once a week, I use this free photo transfer app: http://phototransferapp.com/win/
to download my pics to two 2 TB SSID external hard drives, one main and the other backup. The drives are also used for other file backup/storage so the investment wasn't strictly for photos.

I take pics on my Iphone and it transfers to Icloud. I didn't like how Icloud dealt with them so I installed Google photos. With Google, I arrange the photos in albums. I then download to my computer and save on a couple spare drives. I did this because my project now is to catalog most of the pictures and slides that belonged to my Parents. I will then put them on DVD's or USB and pass out to my siblings.

Took this one today, I remember it from a few years ago when we paved the buildings parking lot. They made this one look likes it's leaning, love to see what it looks like on the inside.

If you're ever in the area and have a little time to kill, check out the Philadelphia Navy Yard, the photos I've posted really don't look as cool as the buildings do in person.

https://i.postimg.cc/9XwFKb3k/1.jpg

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Here's one of my concerns ... about anything cloud based. Nothing is perfectly secure, hard drives can fail, but clouds can be hacked or leak info ...

https://tinyurl.com/ybtxm4dh

Excellent point! You could do hard disk backup song with different cloud options, not necessarily mutually exclusive

as being hacked, there's nothing objectionable contained with the 13k+ pics that are now uploaded by me to amazon. If there were, I could see not wanting to upload them. I bet there are in fact tons of objectionable ones too, that are fine, just that common sense would say not to do that.

When we think about phishing, imho the reason it works, is that there is a decent likelihood that something the emails states has to do with the recipient. That they are a Bank of America, Chase, Costco, amazon, etc. etc. customer.

Then go to the simplest that one would think could not work today: "Hi this is the IRS calling, we need your DOB and SS# to stop the audit that we are about to conduct," etc. How can that possibly work in 2020?

another pet peeve: we've been on the do not call registry since 2004, and all day long, get all kinds of solicitations. What a useless list (I think there are ways around it--if you do business with a co., they are allowed to call you, or sell your info. great)

You lost me at that word. My soul is worth much more than ten bucks.

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it;s the dog's fault