Friday, November 2, 2012

Hands On: Amazon wants you to trust it with your photos

Amazon's cloud storage service for photos isn't just for Kindle HD users anymore. The company made its Cloud Drive Photos app available for most Android devices today. Signing in with your Amazon account will net you 5GB of free space for your pictures.

Android phone and tablet users have yet another option for cloud-based storage, though this time it’s specifically for photos. Amazon has made its Cloud Drive Photos app, which is already integrated into the Kindle Fire HD, available on most Android devices. This app looks like a service that will serve constant photo-snappers quite well.

The app initially asks for users to sign in using an Amazon account. You’re going to want to sign up for an account if you don’t already have one, because this app is completely useless if you don’t. The point of a cloud drive service is to save space, not take it up. Once you’re signed in, you’ll be greeted with the app’s home screen, or the “Cloud” tab. This simply explains to you how to access your drive online and add content from your computer that can then be viewed on your phone or tablet.

There is a second tab atop the display in this app called “Photos.” This is where you will actually be able to see the photo content that is currently saved on your device. Your camera roll, screen captures, Draw Something drawings, Instagram images, and all other photographic data is displayed. These are displayed by category, which can then be explored to see what each album holds. Pressing and holding on an album or an individual picture will allow you to manage the selection, prompting you to either remove it from the device or upload it to the cloud. These are very contrary choices, so make sure you select the one you want. The app also doesn’t appear to automatically sync and there is no option to do so in the settings, so you’ll have to manually update your sync after every snapshot, making this app annoyingly out of date compared to options from Google+ and others. 

All users of Amazon’s Cloud Drive Photos get 5GB of free storage. That can be upgraded to 20GB of space for $10 a year. Everything you upload is accessible right from your Amazon account, making it easy to manage from your phone or your computer. The app isn’t exactly feature rich, but it does the job it claims. An auto-sync feature would be nice, but it looks like we’ll have to wait until the next update to see if it’s there.

you can download the Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app on the Google Play store or Amazon’s Appstore.


Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/hands-on-amazon-wants-you-to-trust-it-with-your-photos/

0 comments:

Post a Comment