If you haven’t heard yet, Amazon has recently released a new app for Android called Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, an app that allows you to backup your photos to Amazon’s cloud. Let’s take a look at how it does.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

The primary function of this app is to let you backup your photos to Amazon Cloud Drive, which provides 5 GB of free cloud storage. In addition to backing up your photos, by putting your photos in your Amazon Cloud Drive account, this app essentially doubles as a sync tool that syncs all your photos across your other devices that have Amazon Cloud Drive apps (smartphones, tablets, or computers); once on Amazon Cloud Drive, you can even view your photos on your PC or Mac via the web browser. In other words, with Amazon Cloud Drive Photos you not only backup your photos but you also have access to your photos from anywhere and from any device.

Take note Amazon Cloud Drive gives users 5 GB of free storage. An extra 20 GB can be had for $10 a month.

Pros

• Allows users to backup photos to Amazon Cloud Drive easily, with one tap
• Individual photos can be backed up or whole albums
• Users can view all photos stored on Amazon Cloud Drive
• Features a simple-to-use interface
• Allows you to share your photos stored on Amazon Cloud Drive with a wide variety of social networks

Cons

• Can only upload photos to Amazon Cloud Drive — what about other types of files?
• Doesn’t have an automatic upload feature — all photos must be uploaded manually
• Doesn’t allow you to rename albums once uploaded
• The app can be buggy at times (it is a new app)
• Is not fully optimized for Android tablets

Discussion

As already mentioned, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos allows users to upload photos on their Android device to their Amazon Cloud Drive account. This serves two functions:

• It allows you to backup your photos to the cloud, which can be restored (downloaded) in case something happens to your Android device or the photos on your device.
• It syncs your photos from your Android to your other devices that have Amazon Cloud Drive apps or access to Amazon Cloud Drive via the web, including other smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Overall, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos is a very easy-to-use app with a simple interface. To upload a photo to Amazon Cloud Drive, simply long-ta the photo in whatever photo viewing app you use, tap the “Send” or “Share” option, and select “Upload to Cloud Drive”. Your photo will then be uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive. The same can be done to whole photo albums or folders.

Once you have uploaded photos to Amazon Cloud Drive, or you had photos already uploaded to Amazon Cloud Drive, opening the app allows you to view all the photos and albums that are stored on your Amazon Cloud Drive account. When viewing a photo, you can download it from Amazon Cloud Drive to your device or share it via email, messaging, or a plethora of social networks.

Performance wise, this app is not bad, but at times it can be a little buggy. For example, sometimes an odd looking line appears at the bottom of the screen in this app. Another example is once when I opened the app, it just continually tried to load my pictures; I had to close and reopen the app for it to properly load them. But the good thing about the bugs in this app is that they really don’t affect the core functionality of the app — they are more annoyances than anything else. This is a new app and Amazon will likely get around to ironing out all the issues soon.

Like most all Android apps, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos works on smartphones and tablets. However, while it generally works well, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos isn’t perfectly optimized for tablets: some content appears to be a little blurry at times while at other times some things just don’t look quite right on the screen. I noticed this when I signed into my Amazon account; I’m not sure why that is.

In my opinion the biggest drawback to Amazon Cloud Drive Photos is there is no ability to automatically upload photos to Amazon Cloud Drive. I understand that automatic uploading will have some negative battery consequences but users should at least have the option to have their photos automatically be uploaded. After all, this is being pushed as a photo backup app and a backup app is that much better if it automatically backs up files.

Conclusion and download link

Overall, if you are looking for a simple app to backup your photos to the cloud then Amazon Cloud Drive Photos is a decent solution for you. But if you want the ability to automatically backup photos, than I would recommend something like Dropbox seeing as Dropbox has the ability to automatically backup new photos whereas Amazon Cloud Drive Photos does not (yet).

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.0.1910

Requires: Android 2.3.3 or higher

Download size: 4.8 MB

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos on Play Store