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.

I stupidly bought a 16gb iPhone, 6 Plus, thinking it would be more than enough space at the time - boy was I wrong!! I use Prime Photos all the time to upload all my media files, syncing and uploading done automatically upon opening the app (can be done over both WiFi and cellular data, your choice), then delete all off my phone immediately freeing up storage to take more. The uploads are quick so I don't have to leave much room for photo/media on my phone as I can simply upload then delete mid-event, such as when I'm at my kids' sports. You also have the ability to control the cache size Prime Photos uses and can delete it easily within the app whenever you need to. iCloud photo storage doesn't allow for this and still takes up a lot of storage on the phone. Plus only 5gb of iCloud storage space is free of cost while Prime Photos is unlimited and has far more capabilities usage wise. CON: and this is a big one I learned the hard way; when taking photo bursts you have to save all photos in the burst prior to uploading as Prime Photos will only upload one out of the burst. Because I use bursts a lot during my kids' sporting events, they're usually 15-20 pics large but I only like to keep maybe 2 or so out of the burst. It's real easy to fill up space using the bursts because of their size, but before I can delete any I have to save all of the pics in them since I don't have enough time to go thru and pick just the best shots before I want to take the next burst. That means more time needed for uploading over slower cellular data to Prime Photos and then later having to sort through and delete. It'd be nice if there was a fix/option in Prime Photo to upload all pics in a burst.

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.