bead69d062c53436f19b6577ec7b524b9aa54445  DSC_0010.JPG
  83ade975de96b81d272642740e06480fbc1484e1  DSC_0010.NEF

  bead69d062c53436f19b6577ec7b524b9aa54445  DSC_0010.JPG
  83ade975de96b81d272642740e06480fbc1484e1  DSC_0010.NEF

The most annoying thing was it treated the NEF and JPG files separately, and showed pictures twice in the UI.

Downloaded off device that image was taken with via Image Capture

  3942cf85f43282ece05ee01ef82f3b245e1638e6  IMG_2273.JPG

  0271267eb3fe02a27398e20e285cf14a26333510  IMG_2273.JPG

...

Running this through exiftool, the image downloaded via icloud.com/photos has the following EXIF stripped which is the likely cause of the above change:

  GPS Latitude Ref          
  GPS Longitude Ref         
  GPS Altitude Ref          
  GPS Time Stamp            
  GPS Speed Ref             
  GPS Speed                 
  GPS Img Direction Ref     
  GPS Img Direction         
  GPS Dest Bearing Ref      
  GPS Dest Bearing          
  GPS Date Stamp            
  GPS Altitude  
  GPS Date/Time 
  GPS Latitude  
  GPS Longitude 
  GPS Position

  exiftool -gps:all= IMG_2273.JPG

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

I have nothing else on my cloud drive.

While not on that list, it seems raw files are supported

Currently the unlimited photo storage benefit includes most major image file types: JPEG, GIF, (both animated and non-animated), most common TIFFs, RAW, PNG, and BMP.

This means at this time the .nef, .rw2 and .orf will be considered as unsupported format and will count against cloud drive storage limit.

For more information about Cloud Drive Photos & Videos file requirements, go to:

https://www.amazon.com/help/clouddrive/photos/filerequiremen...

I've forwarded your comments as feedback to our Amazon Cloud Drive team that you want .NEF file type images to be included in the unlimited photo storage benefit so that they aren't counted against your Cloud Storage quota. We're adding more file types to the unlimited photo storage feature, and file types not compatible now may become compatible in the future.

It's OneDrive for Business (i.e. SharePoint) that sometimes modifies uploaded files. To the best of my knowledge, OneDrive Consumer (http://onedrive.com) operates no differently than `rsync` would.

Yeah, I know. Sigh.

"The New Microsoft" seems to be making better decisions overall, but it apparently didn't learn anything from the early-2000s ".net branding clusterfuck" which conflated their runtime platform, development tools, consumer-facing single-sign-on, and a few dozen other things in the mind of the public.

Perhaps out of hope but more likely Stockholm syndrome, over the last decade I seem to have got stuck in a cycle of: Blind love and hope for a new product of theirs, utter disappointment at the resulting clusterfuck after a week, hatred, switch to something else, miss it, go crawling back.

Only just broken out of this loop but to be honest it knackered my productivity badly over the years.

Ultimately I'm a sucker I suspect but the revelation that FreeBSD hadn't actually poked me in the eye once in the last decade had turned my hand finally. That and ruby.

Yes I got tangled in DNA, ATL etc as well. Nothing but regret.

Acquiring new customers is always significantly more expensive than retaining existing customers.

Lock-in is always an issue to consider regardless of how shiny those golden handcuffs are, end of the day they are still handcuffs.

What's been bothering me is that the 2 day shipping has started to turn into 3 or 4 days, and the deliveries have started mysteriously getting statuses such as "customer refused delivery" or "unable to deliver" even when I'm home all day. This is entirely anecdotal, but I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of effect going on with drivers who have started to see more Amazon packages and interpreted as not being as serious as a delivery as other expedited shipments.

Anybody else had similar experiences?

Sometimes people still don't understand Sunday delivery and don't look for it or expect it.

USPS get ~$1.50 per parcel from Prime. (trying to recall redacted pdf with that figure). EDIT orig reversed

True story> Because 100% prime delivery is required, after checking the nightly report and found one amazon not delivered, a supervisor had to knock on a customer's door after 8pm and ask if he could scan the package. The package was already in the garbage and had to be given to the sup. [This is an extreme case but it does reflect the "emergency" hyper nature given to Prime parcels.]

If in fact the status you receive from your Prime packages are "refused" or "unable" it could be many things.. from bad (they want to stop the "clock") or most likely other things: Dog in yard; no safe and secure place to put the parcel; It is raining like hell and your regular carrier knows you don't want wet diapers (oh, by the way Kimberly Clark Amazon delivered diapers are exposed on the bottom; great for store shelves but not good if you leave them on a wet set of stairs);

Unfortunately that's simply not true. I live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets, and we have dedicated spots for mail to be delivered, particularly for USPS.

Also, this opens the door to amazon tapping into multiple-prime-accounts-per-household, which would be a nice benefit for them.

More recently, however, Google Shopping Express has taken the bulk of my non-perishable purchases - the pricing on Amazon is no longer favorable compared to GSX or my local store. This pricing issue is magnified when looking at small quantities (i.e., 1 unit, that's not ). Often GSX items (or similar items) will be on sale at one store or another. Also finding the reviews on GSX to be less gamed.

If Google started charging per-delivery for GSX, I would still use it (but less often).

- I couldn't care less about the video offer - and it is mandatory, useless, unusable and increases the price

- I don't care about 'bonus' features I didn't sign up for. I signed up for (mostly) free shipping

Given that, I am happy to leave that service behind and if shipping becomes to expensive I might reconsider the default 'go to Amazon and check there' behavior.

This move by Amazon is absolutely about lock-in. Get their tentacles into as much unrelated to commerce as possible and you will likely keep your commerce with them too.

BUT: then they tack on "Amazon respects your privacy and Your Files are subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice." In the Privacy Notice, they state that any information you give Amazon in any way may be used "for such purposes as responding to your requests, customizing future shopping for you, improving our stores…" Not sure how this interfaces with the Cloud EULA, but it seems to do the opposite of "respecting your privacy."

https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/fire-p...

I believe this is the same tech in their latest version of the barcode reader in their iOS app too.

(If you don't feel like visiting TechCrunch.)

Just for the sake of argument, why rent when you can own? For $99 a year, you can buy a 2-TB external drive (Seagate's is $90 on Amazon at this time) and keep backing up your stuff to fresh hardware.

If you plan on subscribing to Amazon Prime in perpetuity, great. But if you should change your mind, you have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere. Of course, you do have them all safely backed up on at least two local devices, do you not? In which case, why pay extra for AMZN's service?

I let Google+ back up my phone photos and videos because why not? It's convenient. But I still plug in the phone and pull the camera folder onto a hard drive periodically.

There's also the privacy consideration. Now that we all know the NSA can take our data arbitrarily, secretly, and with impunity, do we really want a pictorial guide to our lives to be out there and available for them to peruse?

- The Seagate drive you mention has horrible failure rates, IIRC.

- Unless you know how to set up and monitor a ZFS pool, don't bother. Your data will not survive without this.

- Are you confident enough in your backup solution? Are your backups offsite? Are they offsite on another ZFS pool, or similar mechanism? Do you check your backups for integrity? What is your strategy for when backups (or original data) is corrupt?

- Does your home grown solution provide a secure sync capability between all your devices? Alternatively, do you have access to the photos from all your devices?

- Does your home grown solution allow your friends and family to view/download a subset of the photos from any of their devices?

- Is your solutions online a reasonable percentage of the time?

- Is your home grown solution as fast as AWS? As in, if you are traveling and want access to your data, how fast will it download/upload?

Basically, unless you plan on spending quite a bit of time setting this up, and know what you are doing, it is much much cheaper to pay from Prime, or similar.

Edit: BTW, the box you put these drives into must have ECC RAM. Without it, expect corruption. Same goes for your other box, the backup you host offsite.

That's a rather strong statement to make.

[1]http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf [2]http://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

I do this (home backups), but I also value having offsite backups.

I don't see Prime photos as a reason to signup for Prime by itself, but hell, as a longtime Prime member who has signed up just for shipping, I'm obviously very happy with how they've continued to role out perks.

I don't even plan to use Photos (OS X isn't supported yet, anyway), but I love the demonstration of their commitment to Prime members. More than anything, that's where I think things like this are valuable.

> have a pretty big downloading task ahead of you to get all these images and move them elsewhere

I would say instead you have an enormous uploading task ahead of you to move 2 Tb of photos from your HDD into the cloud somewhere.

Plus, the main reason I have photos is to share them with other people. If I'm going to end up uploading them somewhere else, it's just easier.

I know opinions differ on privacy, but I honestly could not care less who sees my vacation photos.

And if you don't stay with Prime, you just fall back to Amazon Cloud Drive. Their pricing isn't amazing, but not horrible either. $25/year for 50GB.

For comparison, S3 redundant storage is $18/year for 50GB.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/pricing/ref=cd_home_navpri...

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

  - the auto-backup apps on the different platforms
  - the web interface for online browsing and sharing.
  - not having to worry about hard drive failures.

This ends up being a good bit more expensive, but you'll actually have your photos in 10 years instead of having just a dead hard drive.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-pho...

[2] https://github.com/photo

[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...

[4] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

edit: added link #4

Expect other cloud providers to follow suit:

"Use our unlimited (and slow) storage if you'll sign up to use our crappy (device|app|service)".

Don't expect:

"Use our unlimited storage for (free|low fee) from anywhere".

A small budget for a v1 desktop & mobile app that gracefully removed all this fuzziness could disrupt this 'store your photos here!' war between giants, using their own cloud file storage products. However that's when the transfer rates become switching costs...

But I do believe photo storage is worth a premium over file storage specifically: Photos are of family; Family is cherished; some people would run into burning buildings to save family photo albums...

is now the time?

[1] https://medium.com/@jmathai/hello-2014-goodbye-consumer-phot...

[2] https://github.com/photo

[3] https://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/fellows/jaisen-mathai...

Let me know if/when you want to go back to consumers. A lot has changed in 4 years and I think you hit the nail on the head with some of your previous comments. In the current environment, many people are comparing the next hard drive purchase vs cloud storage purchase. I don't believe that was the case 1 year ago.

That was before the iOS 'Your cloud storage is full' alert started scaring mothers and grandmothers everywhere in thinking their photos will be gone forever!.

That was before the (..possible) facebook decline (but my photos are there!!)

you've got a headstart on me, but features I want:

Let me be an Admin and control which cloud provider i'm going to pay for. I'll set up the vendor accounts as needed/recommended by your newsletter.

Let my Wife, Mother, Father, Mother-in-law do the uploading and sharing - seamlessly as they would with their other apps as I change hosting providers behind the scenes for them as I feel the need. the most basic of UI needed for them. - think an app they could launch to see 'All Backed-up' or 'Backing up now'

I wouldn't prioritize cropping, tagging, 'liking', emailing, sharing, communicating, friending, etc

Best of luck!

To your point, the idea is/was great but if it wasn't good enough that you stopped using it because of a login issue that emphasizes my point.

I agree it's a great idea and other have had it before me and obviously still continue today. I don't believe it's something you can scale a large business from.

On that topic, I suppose that I'm going to have to think about how much curation I should do for the multimedia that I keep at all. I'm backing up about 1.5TB to cloud storage and that's at or over the limit of what I really have the network bandwidth to reasonably deal with. And I know that most of what's backed up could be easily deleted--but it would take time to do that curation.

http://www.expandrive.com/

1. http://remotestorage.io/

2. http://cloud-rail.com/

3. https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS

Disclosure: I maintain byoFS.

[1] http://remotestorage.io/

I'm not affiliated with the developer, just a big fan.

And I'm feeling really bad for picturelife right now.

Aside from that the service is wonderful and I'm really coming around to it. I want them to succeed and I hope they do.

> Amazon talks about ways of accessing photos, but does not include an API, or even RSS. Why?? What a waste.

https://twitter.com/davewiner/status/529637391951495168

I have looked at so many photo services and nothing is providing the tools or sustainable business plan that I am looking for.

Agree. anything 'included with prime' lately makes me think its really to better understand & sell to primers, rather than gain new ones.

1. cheap storage. I'm willing to pay $5 for 100GB.

2. don't muck around with my pictures. I have a nice camera.

3. don't copy all of the pictures on my account to all my devices, I'm trying to free up storage, not consume it.

4. let me setup a slideshow on my TV easily. I have (multiple) game consoles hooked up (that have web browsers). I have a Chromecast. Music + pictures = instant emotional win! Just let me pick an album "start slideshow" and put on some cheesy music automatically.

5. Let me easily share albums with family/friends, and let them access the pictures easily

Right now Picasa + Google Plus is the closest. The one thing is that there is no good way to get a slideshow going on my TV. This is actually a big deal to me. I have a Chromecast and all the major game consoles connected to my TV - and there's still no good solution. OneDrive on Xbox One gets pretty close for TV slideshows, but then I have to upload an album specifically to OneDrive - which actually isn't too bad. But it's still cumbersome to get a slideshow with music going and because Xbox One doesn't do background music I have 1/4 of the screen taken up:

* load up music app

* find something to fit the "mood" which is annoying to do on Xbox Music

* go to one drive

* navigate to album

* start slideshow

* snap xbox music

Well there's the issue. S3 rates are $3 for 100GB, which leaves $2/mo to provide the value-added services you enumerate.

You'd need 5k monthly subscribers just to hire 1 engineer.

Google+ and Chromecast are like 85% of the way there. I just want to open up the Google+ app on my phone, go to an album and "cast slideshow" and have that be a great experience. Right now it's horrible.

Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping, so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.

I know what you mean. Lately I've gotten the impression that companies aren't offering photo storage as a feature to entice more people to use their services, but that they want our photos for some reason. Maybe advances in image recognition let them use the photos to mine marketable data?

http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/storepage/storePageId=page-...

http://www.snapfish.com/snapfish/helppricing

With OneDrive and Amazon offering unlimited storage, it can't be long until Google and Dropbox (whose clients actually work) offer the same. But Google had better step up soon. I really don't see why I should continue to pay for GDrive when Amazon bundles unlimited storage with my already-essential Prime membership.

$8.25 a month to get unlimited photo storage. It does not, however, give you ability to share albums, just individual files. Which makes it meh, since I can't share entire albums with people, which is what I'd want to do if I upload all my photos.

Or "free" if you already had Prime. I can't see anyone signing up for it just for this new service.

I have been looking for a way to easily offsite backup my photos without adding another row in my "cost of being alive"[1] spreadsheet (which already contains Prime). I don't need to access them, it doesn't have to be fancy, I just want to keep them safe at a second location.

[1] Add up all the monthly/yearly services you pay for so that if you did literally nothing at all, that's the amount you'd be charged per month. Things like github, prime, linode, gym, parking permit, ACM membership, etc. That's your cost to just be alive (before choosing to consume anything).

Eventually I'm going to be using so many Prime services that I'll never want to cancel it.

$150 and I would still save on shipping.

I've got it running on my desktop at home; I've got gigs and gigs of photos there. My macbook doesn't have enough free disk space to store all of them - and Crashplan doesn't let me store and sync just the 2014 photos.

The flow is directories on your machine > BackBlaze.

Anything in the other direction is manual.

Backup: Comp #1 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #2 (Selected) -> HomeNAS Comp #6 (Out of State Mother Inlaws (Selected) -> HomeNAS

Work Flow Any Comp working on files from NAS (Not local)

Crashplan has a desktop app that backs up your photos indefinitely though. It backups your external devices as well, been using them for years and I can't tell you how many times it's saved me.

Also speaking strictly about the services I tried -- -- started using free Dropbox with camera uploads and with all friends referrals increased upto 10 GBs which is ultimately not good enough when you auto-upload images from phone camera. -- Then started using Flickr with 1 TB which does not have desktop client for simple drag-and-drop. -- Inconveniently tried using Google Drive on-and-off but simply cumbersome.

Seems as a Primer subscriber, I will find this service valuable for auto-camera upload.

Gmail could do that because "nobody" stored much e-mail. They could be on the case that most people would acquire more archived e-mail at a rate low enough that storage costs would drop quickly enough to cover a large percentage of the growth. In the end it also wasn't all that big deal when it came to customer acquisition: The major competitors all followed after they realised that it wouldn't drive their costs up all that much.

Pictures are different. They are already big. And everyone have lots of pictures. The main reason for signing up for cloud storage for pictures is that you have too many of them to store on your phone/tablet/other small devices, while for e-mail features, and network effects (all those people that knows your e-mail address) mattered far more than storage (consider that e.g. Yahoo charged to upgrade to 50MB or 100MB storage before Gmail, and almost nobody did - the free amount was sufficient for most users).

This is viable for Amazon because Prime customers are highly valuable and 1) we pay, 2) retaining us is worth lots of money - I've been up to over 200 orders a year from Amazon some years, 3) Amazon by now has years of experience driving down the cost of image storage, 4) it helps as a way of driving customers to their Fire platform (e.g. photos and videos in the Amazon cloud account show up on the Fire TV)

So just like politicians roll out the pork before Election Day, Amazon is giving us all sorts of wonderful things to keep Prime around into the new year. (Example: the TV stick that doesn't ship until mid January)

Copy looks promising. If you're willing to pay you use a service like rsync.net, or if you're willing to do a bit of setup you can just use any old shared hosting or VPS service. Or owncloud for some sugar.

And they've got an api https://help.yahoo.com/kb/flickr/difference-free-free-flickr...

Works nicely to get the most of your iOS device storage, share with family, mild private social interactions (e.g. commenting), OSX integration (e.g. you can have one central repo for wallpapers for all devices), etc.

I'm wondering if Dropbox has something in store ? Seems to me like they will need something soon to justify their premium prices.

Good move on Amazon's part to compete - not sure how Dropbox and the like will keep up with this movement towards free unlimited storage.

Actually I wish they would, so that I could check-out physical orders twice as fast without the tedium of deselecting the defaulted 'Yes give me the 30-day Prime trial!' checkboxes. It is quite odious how much upselling they now load into the checkout process.

Source: Contacted Amazon.ca

This doesn't quite meet my needs yet without a decent Mac uploader client but I'll be keeping an eye on it. I have about a TB or so of RAWs and videos in Glacier right now.

I agree with wanting the 1TB option to be cheaper, but I'm finding fewer uses for Dropbox unless I switch to the business plan, which doesn't make sense. However for a family, you get 5 users for 15/mo and unlimited space. I'm still trying to figure out the downside to the business plan.

And I see that they have support for RSS and other feeds which might work for some of the integrations I want to do.

https://github.com/zork3/copyandchangeJPG/tree/master

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/

You would have to be an idiot to upload your photos to a service with nothing more secure than a password. And Amazon is more than just photos -- it's addresses, credit cards, purchase histories, subscriptions...

Amazon, offer TFA asap please!

Yes, there should be some underlying universal API for data storage like this. But, in the meantime, I feel that tying myself to a single provider might bite me in the ass.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/s4NwAs1.png

edit: False alarm, seems to be limited to 10GB.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

.bmp .gif .jpeg .jpg .png .raw .tif .tiff

For videos:

.mp4 (including mov, 3gp, m4v) .avi (including divx) .mts (mpeg transport stream) .mpg (mpeg program stream) .asf/.wmv .flv .ogg

The restrictions can be found at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

What happens if I script n VPS servers with 10Mbps upload speed to generate random images and upload them to the service continuously ?

If you exceed the limit of your current storage plan, you won’t be able to upload additional content but you'll still be able to view, download and delete your files, photos, and personal videos for at least three months.

During this time you can: ...Renew or sign-up for Amazon Prime to enjoy the Prime Photos benefit...

You can only use a mobile app or the web interface to drag and drop files...

   Desktop - Install the Cloud Drive application for PC to add photos from your computer. Download for PC.

   We're currently working on a Cloud Drive application for Mac. 

If so, this is a huge thing for me. I've been looking for somewhere to back up 2TB of RAW files for a long time, but there's nothing out there that's affordable/trustworthy enough that i've found.

EDIT: Nevermind, I'm now reading your comment less as "only smartphone available" and more as "use the smart phone app as a proxy"