Amazon Photos: Photo & Video

I’m able to make albums and even edit photos right in the app to fit the wide format of the echo screen. I can use the albums as slide shows on my echo devices so that each one is personalized. I can share photos remotely on my mom’s echo, this is priceless. She is 94 and really appreciates seeing the photos I upload for her. The app is not intuitive but I have been able to manage using it, and until I finally figured out how to get back to the main group of photos I would just exit out of the app and restart, but I have since then figured out how to do it. I don’t allow access to my entire photo library on my phone because I only want to upload certain photos and not need to search through hundreds of photos, sometimes it is a little finicky on that and I have to do it more than once. Sometimes later I’ll have duplicate photos. But even with those few minor issues still definitely worth five stars for the ability to share photos on all my echo devices.

Cons: I uploaded 7,000+ photos & the app is very laggy when I scroll through them. It frequently freezes so I have to close the app & re-open it to continue scrolling which is a pain to find where I left off & continue - knowing it’s just going to freeze again. The further into my photos I get, the more annoying it gets to re-find my place after a freeze. Second con is if you try to edit your photos through the app (basic stuff like cropping), half of the time it won’t save the image and you can’t exit so, again, you have to close down the app & reopen it & try again. If it doesn’t refuse to save it’ll starts to save, but will freeze halfway through “uploading” the saved image & yet again you have to close down the app. All very annoying. Pro: it saves a lot of space on my phone being able to upload all my photos (but not my videos because I would have had to pay for storage if I did that). I like how when you upload photos it automatically stores them in order to the time stamp on the photo & you can easily search by date. When I upload photos from my camera to my phone it sometimes jumbles all the photos around & when I upload them to the app it re-organizes the photos.

Finally I have 1 place for all of my photos, plus my husband’s phone also uploads so we have all our vaca pics in one place. It’s easy to delete any we don’t like that get uploaded quicker than it took to re I’ve on the phone. The facial recognition is really good that tags pics to a person, which makes organization easier. Also easy to update a pic date which helps when our cameras are not on the right date or are pics of pics. It’s unlimited photo storage. We take a TON of pics and go a lot-we have 172,000 pics this year! Videos have a limit but the upgrade is inexpensive at $6 or $7 a month. The app easily loads on to my phone so I can pull pics from long ago all the time!! And the best part I can use it on my tv as a screensaver and enjoy memories all the time we are sitting there. The only thing I would like is some way to have duplicates auto tag and ask If I wanted them to be removed. That would be slick. Maybe it does that and I don’t know how to work it-I’ll have to ask Alexa!!!