While both of Amazon’s cloud storage solutions - Photos and Drive - occupy the single Amazon Photos pieces of software for the desktop, mobile apps see them split their separate ways. There's also the option to share files and folders, but like a lot of the Amazon Drive features, it's all a bit rudimentary. Searching through your files, as well as carrying out simple operations like moving and renaming, is all straightforward. Unlike iCloud Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, the Amazon Photos desktop client doesn’t occupy a space in your computer’s native file management system, which can interrupt some workflows.Īnybody trying to open a file using the desktop client will be redirected to the browser portal for a preview, which is somewhat convoluted in comparison to other cloud storage services.Ī lot of users may well be able to get by on the web interface alone – you can run one-off uploads from here, but there's no automatic folder uploading. Also, you can't really view your files in the desktop app: it's more of an uploading tool. You can only stream video files that are under 20 minutes in length directly from the web, for example, which immediately puts it behind most of its competitors. While the interface scores highly for ease of use, it's a bit bare-bones in terms of functionality. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue if your plan is to leave the desktop client to run in the background, but if you need quick access to a large file that’s stored in the cloud, you may find yourself waiting a little longer than expected.
In our testing, file transfers were a little slow compared with some key rivals like Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud Drive. We like the way that you can pick any file or folder from your computer and choose to upload them, and the way you can carry out one-off backups as well as keeping specific folders monitored, and overall the desktop applications and web interface are polished enough. It also now includes the ability to sync, Dropbox-style, providing a means to automatically secure new files without any extra user effort.
(Image credit: Amazon) Amazon Drive interfaceĪs we've said, there are a few confusing aspects to Amazon Drive, not least that the software you download to your computer is called Amazon Photos – that suggests that it just deals with your photo library, but in fact the tool will secure any folder or file irrespective of type.