Amazon gives Prime members unlimited storage with Prime Photos

Amazon Cloud Photos (unlimited storage 001)

It’s gotten a lot easier to swallow the Amazon Prime membership fee of $99 per year now that the online retail giant is throwing in free unlimited photo storage with Prime Photos.

Unveiled Tuesday, Prime Photos taps Amazon’s Cloud Drive service to allow Prime subscribers who are Apple users to upload photos from their mobile devices using Amazon’s free Cloud Drive Photos iOS app and have them stored for free in the Amazon cloud, in their original resolution.

Because the service keeps your snaps saved in full resolution, they aren’t compressed and no quality is lost. The Cloud Drive Photos app has a handy Auto-Save feature to automatically back up your photos.

Needless to say, Prime Photos is also accessible on Android devices, Amazon’s Fire tablet and Fire Phone series and through the web via Mac and Windows computers.

And because this is the Amazon ecosystem, your photos can be enjoyed on the big screen using the Fire TV media-streaming box, the newly announced Fire TV Stick (an inexpensive HDMI dongle), the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and select LG and Samsung smart TVs.

Prime Photos is extended to all U.S. Prime members.

You don’t have to be a Prime subscriber to enjoy the benefits of Cloud Drive Photos as the service offers five gigabytes of free cloud storage space for non-Prime users.

For those wondering, Prime membership includes unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping on more than twenty million items, instant streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes through Prime Instant Video, one million songs and hundreds of playlists through Prime Music, early access to select Lightning Deals and access to over 600,000 books to borrow through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

For a limited time, Amazon’s Fire Phone includes a full year of Prime.

Amazon Cloud Drive Photos is available free in the App Store.

The 16.8-megabyte app runs on any iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOs 7.0 or later.

[Amazon, Prime Photos]