5 Things I Love about Amazon Photos

(and a few things I don’t like)

1 – Viewing Photos on Amazon Echo Show ** or Amazon Fire TV Stick **

This is my absolute favorite things about Amazon Photos and the entire reason that I started using it on a regular basis.

We have the 1st Generation Echo Show and it is one of my most favorite things in my home. It does what all the “Alexa” devices do: tell you the temperature, play a song or make a list. But because it has a screen, it can also show your photos! I can say “Alexa, show me photos of Anderson” or “Alexa, show me photos from April 2010” 

2 – Unlimited Photos with Prime Membership

If you already have a Prime Membership, you can upload Unlimited Photos! It also includes 5GB of Video Storage. If you are not a Prime member, it is $19.99 for 100 GB and $59.99 for 1 TB for a year, which is still pretty reasonable considering other options. If you need the TB (which the average person does not), you should really just get a Prime Membership for twice the price and get ALL the other benefits. I personally pay $19.99 annually so that I have more room for videos.

3 – Facial Recognition

Amazon Photos does a relatively good job of facial recognition and therefore can be a great way to find that photo or photos of one particular person. I can find “Anderson” or “Bruce” in the Amazon Photos App, Amazon Photos Website or on an Amazon Echo Show or Amazon Fire TV. If it gets it wrong, it is relatively easy to update or remove a name tag (although I found out that’s not as easy in everyone’s account when my sister-in-law was trying to update her names in her account).

4- Multiple ways to upload

You can add your photos to Amazon Photos in a variety of ways. The Amazon Photos App for you phone (Android or iPhone) can be set up to automatically upload all photos from your phone or you can choose which photos to upload.

There is also an Amazon Photos application that can be downloaded to your desktop (on your computer). This can also be configured to upload in different ways. It can watch a particular folder on your computer and upload automatically or you can choose folders to upload on your own.

I personally upload directly to the website and I can choose individual photos or upload entire folders.

5 – Places & Things

Amazon Photos groups photos by places automatically. (Of course, the GPS has to be turned on your phone photos or some cameras also have the features.) It’s cool if you are looking for the photos that you know you took in Kenesaw, Nebraska.

It also uses artificial intelligence to find “things” in your photos such as playground, dog, airplane and boats. This is really a fun feature but not always accurate.

And a few things I don’t love

1. In certain instances, the dates of photos do not show up correctly. (I see this mostly with scanned photos that dates of been corrected and show up correctly in ALL other photo programs that I use.) 
2. The Family Sharing requires extra steps to get the to show on the Echo Show devices.
3. The facial recognition could be better and it needs to improve to be on par with Google’s facial recognition.
4. There is not the ability to add locations to photos if you would like (which is easy in many programs).

Published in June 2019

Updated in November 2020