Amazon Photos/Drive Problems Understanding

GaryLaird

GaryLaird

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Name
Gary Laird
Edit My Images
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Hi Guys,
First post in quite a few years. Have just gone through the massive job of trying to pull together old family pictures from slides,photographs and digital. So did the hardwork, Now images all in nice directories relating to the eneny/subject of the photographs within,

Next step was to find a cloud based archive. As I'm an Amazon prime subscriber I have free photo storage so obvious choice BUT have run in to issues....one of which is major!

Ive tried chatting with Amazon customer services on their site but that was worse than useless and I ended up on a call with an agent who was no better and clearly did not understand their product other than the most basic of functions!

So I'm reaching out to any Amazon Photos users out there who have sucessfully managed to use their service.

As I have 1000's of images I want to backup and be able to view, I used Amazon Drive (web browser) to upload a complete directory of all my images. Including all nicely labelled sub directories. Now I did this via the 'Upload' button....select the root directory and away we go....was uploading all night. So far so good. Now the questions/problems:

  1. As mentioned I used upload button when logged in to Amazon Drive web page. How and where do I set this to be a regular/synced backup? I cant find any way to control this. Is it already set? Strange I cant find and settings for this?
  2. My intention is now to use the folder structure from the drive directory to create Albums to organise things. This is cleasrly documented BUT does not work. I can click on the little folder icon next to the Create Folder button. This opens up a window with directories listed and I can scroll down and through the sub-directories. BUT there is no way to select them! Clicking on them just opens the folder...there seems no selection function? I tried on different PC with different web browser but same result. Cant select the folders and the Choose Folder button at the bottom is greyed out.
Now point 1 is probably fine, the amazon agent confirmed that any change that I make to the local images folder would be synced with the cloud drive folder. I'm not entirely convinced but OK.
The 2nd point is a mystery. Its well documented on the web that there is a feature that allows you to use the 'drive' folder structure to create albums containing the appropriate images.....but it just does not work. Would love if anybody out there could confirm this IS working and its just me or my computer having a meltdown! The amazon agent told me this feature may not have been implemented yet.....yeah right!!!!!!

Just cant believe something that should be so simple can be so complcated!
 
Another Issue I've just noticed Is the huge number of images listed as having no date. These are images that were scanned. I used IMBatch to edit EXIF tags to create a 'date taken' date. When I right click the file in Windows explorer I can see the date taken displayed correctly. Now there are 100's of tags used for EXIF data so I may have used the wrong tag but I figured that if windows recognised it correctly then I could not be far wrong. Seems Amazon Photos has different idea. Maybe reads a different tag??? This is getting heavy!
 
Beginning to think Amazon Photos is a non starter! Anybody using Dropbox as an alternative?
 
I use it - I do everything manually - nothing syncs at all.

I really see it as a "if my house burns down" my RAWs are safe sorta option.

I create folders on my drive for each shoot

eg 2022_03_Glencoe and store the raw's + side car files within that. I drag and drop into amazon drive. If I re-edit - I go back into the folder, and redrag the side car files into the corresponding folder on amazon. It's a pain.
 
SFTPhotography said:
I use it - I do everything manually - nothing syncs at all.

I really see it as a "if my house burns down" my RAWs are safe sorta option.

I create folders on my drive for each shoot

eg 2022_03_Glencoe and store the raw's + side car files within that. I drag and drop into amazon drive. If I re-edit - I go back into the folder, and redrag the side car files into the corresponding folder on amazon. It's a pain.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the reply Ranger. I can see how it would work perfectly for your application!

As what I'm talking about are family snaps for the most part, being able to view them and to do so, organise them in some logical way is essential. Having everyting in date order is fine to a point (when it works!) but if your looking for an almost forgotten family holiday to Spain the last thing you would remember is the date! I took time to add tags to my images incuding places, dates, features.....again this seems to be ignore by Amazon Photos....ah dear!
 
Yeah a bit hopeless I'm afraid, though I've just dumped Prime as most of the extras were useless for me the photos storage was absolutely useless.
 
gramps said:
Yeah a bit hopeless I'm afraid, though I've just dumped Prime as most of the extras were useless for me the photos storage was absolutely useless.
Click to expand...
It amazes me how a company like Amazon have, what seems to be, a fairly poor offereing. I'm really hoping someones going to drop by here and tell me I'm wrong and that it works well! It also seems so poorly suported with no tech support to speak of! I know its like a free service with Prime.....but come on Amazon. I mean everyone has family snaps, everyone would love/need a place to be able to store them and be able to enjoy them, it should not be so difficult to implement.

I'm considering Dropbox, at least the create Albums from directory feature seems to work well. Issue with Dropbox is lack of vewing applications. OK for your PC and Phone but smart TV/firestick app does not seem to exist and is, you would think, a fairly basic function of a photo hosting service. Its where I would think Amazon should shine!

Also Amazon has a hide photo feature which is nice......the wife topless on the beach 30years ago is fun for us to look at but maybe a touch embarassing when your familys all round for dinner. Dropbox seems to need you to move such images to a 'hidden' folder but that just screws up the filing system......nothings perfect!!!
 
I dumped my Amazon Photos app, it was always trying to upload the last photo on my tablet!
 
I have had a mixed experience with it. I have been able to sync the image folders on my PC with the cloud, and I can use it to post here (albeit in a not very intuitive way, by having to write my own BBcode). The windows uploader is pretty hopeless - it seems to kill my internet whenever I turn it on, and I have taken to just leaving it on overnight to sync my photos when I am not online.

It's obviously not aimed at amateur photographers, and more about capturing peoples images off their phone so Amazon can use the data to sell advertising. But I find that it does work if you can put up with how user unfriendly it is.

As others have said, it is my catastrophe backup. I backup on drives locally too.
 
You can create a new album in Amazon Photos from a folder in Amazon Drive by clicking the "folder" icon at the top of the "Albums" screen in Photos. This takes you to a dialogue box headed "Select Amazon Drive folders". Simply choose the folder(s) and click "Create Albums".

Syncing Drive and Photos used to be relatively simple but Amazon removed much of that functionality (maybe all) some time ago. TBH, it's too much hassle these days and I've stopped using it except as a backup of RAW files, much like Ranger Smith.
 
Syncing and backup shouldn't be mentioned together, unless you can set the sync to one way, else you run the risk of tidying up your hard drive, and the sync will delete the files from the cloud as well.

I have also found cloud services are too slow for anything but back up, trying to work from a cloud storage is painful when there are thousands of files.

I do a one way sync from my PC to a 2TB usb drive, than a one way sync from that to a server, then sync (one way) that two two separate NAS drives.

The original sorting was done using PhotoMove, moving from many old hard drives to a server, as it takes everything and sorts it to camera mode and then year, and keeps and renames duplicates. Took me weeks!
 
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