Amazon Photos migration to Photos+ and BlackBlaze

Recently I got emailed by Amazon letting me know that their prices would be increasing by over 25% from $79 to $99 per year. While this isn’t an insane amount given how long they have been holding the price at $79. It did make me consider my vendor lock-in.

I use Amazon Prime mainly for the shipping, however also it’s my primary way to save photos from my phone. Amazon offers Prime Members unlimited full resolution photo backup, with 5GB of storage for videos for all prime members. Over the years I have backed up roughly 70GB of Photos and 10GB of Video which prompted me to pay for a 100GB add-on of storage for another $25/year.

Using this price hike as a excuse to evaulate my vendor lock-in I started taking a look at other cloud backup operations. The big ones everyone knows are Google Photos, Apple iCloud, and Microsoft OneDrive. Google Photos suffers from the same price points as Amazon Photos, charging in 100GB blocks. Apple iCloud is only useable with iOS devices, since I have an Android or two it was eliminated, and OneDrive also seemed to be very focused on the Windows platform.

Expanding my search I started thinking if there was a solution that just used cloud storage in the backend. Amazon S3 is fairly cheep to store content costing around $0.023 per GB per month. So storing my 85~ GB of content per year would cost around $23.50 for the whole year. Providers like BlackBlaze which charge $0.005 per GB per month bring that down to $5.10 in storage costs per year.

Looking around there didn’t seem to be many options, however I did find Photos+. This app itself costs $10/year or $25 for three years. It allows you to plugin an API key for BlackBlaze, Amazon S3, or Google Drive and acts as an interface to the backend object storage. This has the added benefit of only charging you for how much data you use.

Unfortunately Amazon doesn’t offer any export option from their CloudDrive or Amazon Photos. You must install their thick client and manually kick off a download operation. This process took me quite some time as the max paralellism that you can set is 8 threads. With over 17,000 objects stored it took several hours to download 85GB of content despite me having a 1gbps fiber connection.

Once I had downloaded the content I created a series of .zip files for each folder I had in Amazon and logged into the web-interface of Photos+. Here you can upload a Google Takeout file however it seemed to work just fine with pure .zip files with no metadata stored in .json files. For each upload you can define an Album or a Folder to store the files in. All in all it took me maybe 8 hours of transfer time to download all the objects from Amazon, and shift them into Photos+.

The Android App is not too bad, it does however have a few features lacking. The largest one is automatically syncing. Photos+ requires that you launch the application, then click sync to send your newly taken photos and videos to the Cloud. Not terrible, however not exactly ideal. I plan on trying this out for the next little bit to see if I stick with BlackBlaze storage, with a Photos+ frontend. However for now it’s nice to have less vendor lockin than before.

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