Google Photos vs Amazon Photos - Which free photo app is the best

We spend a lot of time on Google Photos here at tech for good reason .

It is an amazing product far from perfect but nevertheless , an amazing tool .

Now , a few weeks ago , I did a video on the benefits of Amazon prime and one of those benefits is Amazon Photos , which is also an amazing tool far from perfect but an amazing tool and it got a lot of interest from you folks , our community .

So today on tech , I thought we would take a look and compare Amazon Photos in Google Photos , two apps , enter probably two apps will leave as well , but that's today on dote here .

How the heck are you doing on this fine day ?

And I hope today that we're going to be able to open your eyes to the differences and the similarities between Google Photos and Amazon Photos .

Now , both of them have a lot more in common than they have differences .

They both cost you something to have access to Google Photos appears to be free , but really it costs you your privacy to use Google Photos .

And Amazon Photos is a paid service unless you are using Amazon Prime in which case it's free , but you still have to be paying Amazon Prime to keep your Amazon photos account going .

So it costs you money and it probably cost you a little bit of your privacy too , but not as much as Google .

But I digress .

They both have a cost attached , but they are also both amazing applications , cloud based services that can do a lot to help us organize and share and manage our massive collections of photos .

And most of us now indeed have a massive collection of photos because of the nature of smartphones and just how easy it is for us to take pictures .

So typically speaking , now we need some intelligence , we need tools to help us organize those photos so that they have more value to us downstream .

And that's really where these two applications are more similar than they are different .

Now , depending on where you live .

Some of the features that I talk about may or may not be available .

In fact , if depending on where you live , Amazon might not , uh photos might not be available at all .

So where is it ?

It's uh United States , UK , Canada , Germany , France , Italy , Spain and Japan at the moment of this recording .

So if you're not in one of those regions , chances are that this comparison will not work for you uh unless Amazon has recently come to your region .

And also now that I think about it , maybe I should explain a little bit more about Amazon Photos because it is included with prime membership .

But you can also purchase Amazon Photos stand alone as a separate application should you choose to or a separate service ?

It's part of the Amazon Drive family of products uh which is their online storage system .

So most of us will access it through prime because you want all of the other benefits of prime .

But indeed , you could also purchase it for , I think almost the same as it costs for prime just as a standalone service .

I don't know why you do that , but you might choose to .

Now , their similarities are far more evident than they are their dis similarities .

But one of the changes or one of the differences between Amazon Photos and Google Photos is Google Photos is a cloud and browser based product only .

You have a Google Photos app on your smartphone , but on your desktop , you access all of your photos through the browser .

Uh with Amazon , you can download an Amazon app for your desktop by either the Windows and mac which will manage and facilitate your uploading and storage .

Uh It doesn't do a lot for organization and sorting , but it does manage your uploading and downloading of the photos .

So there is a difference .

So people who miss say Picasa in the in the Google world might find a bit more of an affinity for Amazon Photos .

As a result of that , I am so sorry to cut in in the middle of this demo .

Uh But I realize as I was editing this video that I completely missed one of the biggest , no , the biggest difference between Google Photos and Amazon Photos .

And that is storage resolution here is what you need to know .

Google Photos gives you unlimited free storage , but it limits the resolution of each and every photo to 16 megapixels , which is a very high resolution photo , but it is not the highest resolution photo that many cameras are taking these days .

A lot of photographers choose to shoot their photos in camera raw format , which can make for huge photo files but allows you almost unlimited editing of those images in the future .

If you're not a professional photographer , uh it's probably not a big deal for you not to be able to store your images in camera raw .

But if you are a professional photographer , then Amazon Photos allows you to store your photos at any resolution as a part of Amazon Photos in Google , you have to pay for an upgrade for storage in order to store unlimited resolution .

That is big difference .

Number one big difference .

Number two .

If you are a video creator , if you're creating lots of videos on your smartphone , uploading them , then Amazon Photos limits you to five gigabytes of space in Amazon .

Whereas Google allows you HD in high definition unlimited storage as a part of Google Photos .

So if you're video centric .

Google is probably a little bit of an advantage there .

If you are photo centric and you want unlimited resolution of photos , then the Amazon solution is probably going to appeal to you more .

So I wanted to make sure that was right up front because that is the biggest difference .

Now , back to our regularly scheduled demo .

When we look at each of the applications , we see , as I say , more similarities than you will find differences .

Here is my Google Photos account .

And you can see obviously we have access to all of our photos and an organizational browser that will allow us to sort our photos into albums and manage them .

And if we go over to Amazon photos , we see the same kind of an organizational browser which sorts your photos and organizes your photos by date and other criteria .

So on the surface , virtually identical as far as the application are concerned .

Now , one big thing that really surprised me about Amazon photos is the automatic image identification , organizational aspect of it .

One of the strengths of Google and also one of the big fears we have with Google is the facial recognition and the object recognition how it looks at an image and it can define who is in that image if you share your Google account with them .

And it actually says these are pictures of Steve dot It identifies that those are pictures of me because it recognizes my face and I can search in Google photos based on the people .

So if I just wanna search or or the activities , so if I just wanna search for me , for pictures of me , I can put in my name and it brings up all of the images that it finds my picture in .

Uh But that is in my mind .

One of the most fascinating , incredibly powerful aspects of Google photos is this image recognition to allow us to sort photos based on who's in them or what activity is happening in that photo .

But it is also for most of us , one of the scariest aspects of Google Photos because Google knows this is a picture of me and it knows all of the things that I'm doing .

And although they say they don't do anything with that information except serve me , it still gives me pause as it gives you pause and it gives the entire world pause .

It's a scary thing .

Now , I always thought in my ignorance that that was one of the big differences between Google Photos and Amazon photos was image recognition .

Imagine my surprise and kind of chagrin when I imported all of my photos and Amazon photos in my Amazon photo account is pretty new right now .

I've just uploaded all of all of my photos to Amazon photos to test it out .

And here as after I uploaded all of my photos , look what it has in the menu bar .

On the side , it allows me to search based on things it finds in the photo .

So it has the same kind of image recognition technology as does Google .

It's just not attached to our Google account .

So it doesn't necessarily have the same context , but look down below it finds all of the people and all of the the regular people in my photos .

And look , it says here is one person , if we select all the photos with just that person , it identifies all the same photos of me , I click here on people and it says , who is this ?

Oh , click on the edit .

There it is .

My name is Steve .

OK .

So I'm saying yes and it's naming me , it identifies me as me .

So now I can start searching based on me .

Now , the difference and a big difference it is between this and Google is this I believe is only contained within my Amazon account .

It isn't looking in my Gmail and in and tying it to my calendar and all of the other things that we can do uh with your Google account when it identifies people because it's identifying contacts .

And here it's just uh basically treating this as it were a tag as far as I know .

But still the power of this is exciting because it means that I if I go through and I name my family members , uh and I name my friends that I can quickly source photos that they are in .

I think that that to me has elevated the capability , the technical capability of Amazon photos far in excess of what I believed it to be before I started testing it out .

One other area that I hope that there would be a profound difference in benefit from one application or the other was in the actual editing of photos using the photo editor .

And I have to tell you that as far as I can tell , I think that the two applications are pretty similar as far as editing here , we are in Google Photos , Google Photos does a pretty good job of automatically adjusting brightness and color of your photos .

Amazon Photos .

If we go into the same photo and take a look at the editing features , the edit photo , but it does the same basic cropping and same basic organization and simple filtering and and managing the color .

So nothing spectacular in both .

In fact , I wrote down in my notes uh As far as the editing goes for both the applications , I said , how good a job do they do ?

I went on both .

So they're both editors .

She gonna want to use another photo application , Amazon Photos , Google Photos .

It's for storage and sharing and organization , not for correcting and editing your photos .

Now , regardless of which of these services you choose the one place you will use the application more than any other is on your smartphone where they both have dedicated apps and you should if you are following good practices , use the app on your smartphone more than the native photo app that's built into your smartphone .

It just makes organization makes everything much cleaner and easier if you use Google Photos or Amazon Photos as your main photo app on your smartphone .

And again , uh II , I hate to say this to you , but the differences between the two are so subtle as to be almost inconsequential in the mobile app .

This is the Google Photos app running on my smartphone .

And you see we have access to all of our main controls along the bottom , including the sharing and albums and all of the photo information here allowing us to tap into any one photo at any time and to be able to do all of the modifications and sharing and editing that we want to do to that particular photo .

And similarly , if we go into Amazon photos , we have just a slightly different layout in organization .

But along the bottom are all of our main sharing and editing and organizational tools and we can go into any of those photos .

And again , we can instead of looking at the bottom to get to the editing , we can edit the photo from the drop down menu and it does all of the same basic features .

The other thing that both of these apps do is they will automatically upload the photos to the cloud So you have them all backed up from your smartphone , which is in my mind , probably the biggest single benefit to the to the smartphone app allowing you to then free up storage space on your smartphone .

Much more quickly and much more readily .

It's bottom line time .

I have to tell you which one wins or if one is better than the other .

And if I'm perfectly honest , I don't think either one wins from a technical perspective for you .

It's probably gonna come down to one of a couple of factors unless you happen to be one of the lucky few who can make a really educated decision based on the fact that you are a dedicated photographer that likes to take camera off files .

So for you , Amazon is a clear winner or you take mainly videos .

So Amazon doesn't give you the free storage for videos .

So in that case , Google is the winner , but for the rest of us , it might come down to which company we feel more comfortable with .

Now , they're both huge scary companies .

Uh But for me , Google wins because of the convenience of Google Photos .

Not that it's a better app , but it's better integrated with the rest of my productivity system .

I'm deeply entwined in the Google ecosystem for better or for worse .

But the fact that Google Photos sits right in the middle and can easily communicate back and forth with my other Google properties for me makes it a more convenient application that has barriers to keep me from doing what I want to do .

Having said that if you are feel uncomfortable with the entire Google ecosystem , the Amazon ecosystem might well give you a little bit more comfort and make you more comfortable .

And it's good to know that regardless of which way you go , you aren't really losing anything as far as flexibility or as far as capability of these different applications , they both perform at a very high level , doing what they're supposed to do and they both have great intelligence built in that give us better organization and give us better control over our photos .

And the other thing we know is they're both in an arms race to add better and better features on an ongoing basis .

So the apps are just going to get better as we move ahead .

And that's something that's fairly encouraging .

Is it not ?

I would love to know your thoughts on whether or not Google Photos or Amazon Photos wins or maybe you use something entirely different that I haven't even mentioned here today .

And you want to fill me in on what you think is the best photo app for you .

Your comments and suggestions are always appreciated here at dote if you have not yet subscribed to our channel , make sure you hit that subscription and ring the notification bell .

So you hear when we upload any new videos looking forward to your comments and suggestions .

Until next time I am do storm in the castle .