- We spend a lot of time on Google Photos here
at Dotto Tech for a 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
(wooshing) 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 DottoTech I thought we would take a look
and compare Amazon Photos and Google Photos.
Two apps enter. (pinging)
Probably two apps will leave as well.
(sad electronic music)
But that's today, on DottoTech.
(bright music)
Steve Dotto here.
How the heck you doing this fine day?
And I hope today that we're gonna be able to
open your eyes as to the differences
and the similarities between Google Photos
and Amazon Photos.
Now both 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's 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 that probably costs 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.
(wooshing)
Now depending on where you live,
some of the features that I talk about
may or may not be available.
In fact, depending on where you live,
Amazon Photos might not be available at all.
So where is it?
It's 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.
Unless Amazon has recently come to your region.
(wooshing)
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 standalone
as a separate application should you choose to,
or separate service.
It's part of the Amazon Drive family of products,
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 can also purchase it for
I think almost the same at it costs for Prime.
Just as a standalone service.
I don't know why you'd do that, but you might choose to.
(wooshing)
Now their similarities are far more evident
than are their dissimilarities.
But one their 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.
With Amazon, you can download an Amazon app
for your desktop on either Windows and Mac,
which will manage and facilitate your uploading and storage.
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 Google world might find a bit more
of an affinity for Amazon Photos
as a result of that.
(static)
I am so sorry to cut in in the middle of this demo,
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,
it's probably not a big deal for you
not to be able to store your images in camera raw.
But if you are professional photographer,
then Amazon Photos allows you to store your photos
at any resolution as a part of Amazon Photos.
In Google, you'll have to pay for an upgrade for storage,
in order to store unlimited resolution.
That is big difference number one.
(wooshing)
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 in 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 that as right up front,
because that is the biggest difference.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled demo.
(static)
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 in 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 applications are concerned.
(wooshing)
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 internet access.
These are pictures of Steve Dotto.
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 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,
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 I am 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 into Amazon Photos,
and my Amazon Photo account is pretty new right now.
I've just uploaded all of my photos to Amazon Photos
to test it out.
And here 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 photos.
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 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.
(whistling)
Okay, 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 tying it to my calendar
and all of the other things that we can do
with your Google account
when it identifies people
because it's identifying contacts
and here it's identifying 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 if I go through
and I name my family members, and I name my friends,
that I can quickly source photos
that they are in.
I think that that, to me, has elevated
the technical capability of Amazon Photos
far in excess of what I believed it to be
before I started testing it out.
(wooshing)
One other area that I hoped there would be
a profound difference in benefit from
one application to 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 the 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 feature.
The edit photo.
But it does the same basic cropping
and same basic organization and simple filtering
and managing the color.
So nothing spectacular,
in fact, I wrote down in my notes,
as far as the editing goes
for both the applications
I said how good a job do they do?
I went meh on both.
So they're both meh editors.
You're gonna want to use another photo editing application.
(wooshing)
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 smart phone
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 is 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, 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 and 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 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 smart phone app.
Allowing you to then free up storage space
on your smartphone much more quickly
and much more readily.
(wooshing)
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 raw 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,
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 less
barriers to keep me from doing what I want to do.
Having said that, if you feel uncomfortable
with the entire Google ecosystem,
the Amazon ecosystem might well
give you a little bit more comfort
in making 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 they 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?
(wooshing)
I would love to know your thoughts
(popping)
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 (chinging)
to fill me in on what you think
is the best photo app for you.
(light music)
Your comments and suggestions are always
appreciated here at Dotto Tech.
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Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming a castle.