Fire Phone unlimited free photo storage only applies to smartphone images, doesn’t include videos

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Handhelds, Storage

You know how Amazon's Fire Phone includes the perk of unlimited photo storage in your Amazon Cloud Drive account? Well, it turns out there are a couple of caveats. Here's how it works:

• The free storage is applied to the account that the Fire Phone is registered under
• The phone will upload your pictures and videos, but only the pictures get unlimited free space. Videos uploaded will use your Amazon Cloud Drive storage allotment.
• Photos uploaded are in their original, full-resolution format
• The unlimited free storage only applies to photos taken and uploaded with the Fire Phone. If you sync over photos to the phone that weren't taken with it, those will count against your allotment. Similarly, if you upload photos taken with the Fire Phone from another device, they'll also count against your storage space.
• If you give away or sell your Fire Phone, all of your photos will remain in your Amazon Cloud Drive. If you then get a new Fire Phone in the future, the unlimited photo storage benefit will return to your account.

Some have been comparing Amazon's offering to what Apple will be including in iOS 8, and later, OS X Yosemite, where it will also allow you to store all of your photos and videos in iCloud. The difference is that Apple will allow you to automatically upload your entire photo library, regardless of where the images were taken, but there will be a fee if you go over 5GB. There's no unlimited option for images, and certainly not for video.

You can pre-order the Amazon Fire Phone now.