Amazon this morning unveiled a new benefit for Amazon Prime members, called Prime Photos — offering free, unlimited photo storage in Amazon Cloud Drive.
The move expands a feature that was previously offered to users of Amazon’s Fire Phone. People who subscribe to the $99/year Amazon Prime program will be able to use the Cloud Drive Photos app to upload photos from iOS, Android, Mac and Windows, in addition to Fire tablets and Fire phone.
It’s the latest attempt by Amazon to beef up its membership program, beyond the core benefits of free two-day shipping and video streaming. The company raised the price of Amazon Prime from $79/year to $99/year earlier this year.
Important question: What happens if you store huge amounts of photos as a Prime member, and later cancel or don’t renew your membership? According to the fine print, you “will lose the unlimited photo storage benefit associated with the membership and your uploaded photos will count toward your Cloud Drive storage limit.”
Without an Amazon Prime membership, the limit for free Cloud Drive storage is 5GB, with paid plans starting at $10/year for 20GB of storage.
