There is no counterpart to Google's generally excellent, one-size-fits-all 'auto adjust.'Īmazon offers text captioning in its browser-based editor, which Google does not-but the typeface selection is limited and pretty crappy. Amazon offers adjustments to brightness, saturation, contrast, gamma, clarity, exposure, shadows, and highlights-but they're all manual. Google also gets the win in general image adjustments. But Amazon's selection of filters seems loaded with not-very-useful crapola, with a significantly clunkier interface than Google's. Amazon Photos, unlike Google, offers automatic cropping to common aspect ratios including square, 4:3, and 16:9. There are pros and cons to both Google's and Amazon's online editors, both of which err on the side of simplicity rather than feature-completeness. While this may be enough for some people, it gives rival Amazon a fresh chance to shine. In Apple's case, you get 5GiB free in Google's, 15GiB (including Gmail and Gdrive).

However, iCloud and Google both demand subscription fees now for more than a few GiB of storage. Google's free, unlimited storage particularly made a third competitor seem like a non starter. But with both iOS and Android offering cloud photo storage built into the operating system itself, Amazon Photos hasn't been as high-profile.

A not-so-new challenger appearsĪmazon Photos isn't new-in fact, it launched six years ago, in November 2014. You can take photos, you can share them with your friends and family, and so forth-but you can't run a photography business on the service without violating its terms. There's also one gotcha on how the service can be used-according to the TOS, Amazon Photos is for non-commercial, personal use only. But if you are a Prime member, you get unlimited, original-resolution photo storage at no additional cost. The new restrictions on Google Photos make a lesser-known competitor, Amazon Photos, suddenly of greater interest.Īmazon Photos is free for anyone with an Amazon account, but without Amazon Prime membership, you're limited to 5GiB. Further Reading Google Photos is the latest “Unlimited” plan to impose hard limitsIn November 2020, Google killed off its long-standing offer of free, unlimited high-resolution photo storage to anyone with a Gmail account.

Amazon photo desktop app waiting status