DIY: Amazon Prime Photos Backup System – Part 3 – Maintenance and More

01 Aug DIY: Amazon Prime Photos Backup System – Part 3 – Maintenance and More

This blog is a follow-on to last month’s blog: https://preciousmemsphoto.com/2020/07/diy-amazon-prime-photos-backup-system-part-2-initial-setup/

In June, I discussed how to set up the basic Amazon Photos/Amazon Drive system to back up the photos from your devices.
Last month, I discussed how to set up the sync folder on your computer and create the Photo Hub.

In this blog, I’ll discuss how to maintain your Photo Hub.

As a reminder, this picture depicts the complete process:

Maintenance should be done on a periodic basis.  

Once or twice a year should be enough.  Maintenance looks a little bit like the initial setup, but at a much smaller scale.

This is the Mirrored Pictures folder on the computer.

These are the manual steps needed to maintain an organized photo collection:

1. If Auto-Sync is OFF, then periodically, the photos in the Pictures (Auto-Save) folder need to be downloaded to your computer.
   1. Double check to be sure these pictures are on your desktop.
2. If Auto-Sync is ON, then the pictures will download automatically, and get deleted automatically from Amazon Drive when you remove them from the Mirrored folders.
3. Whether synced or downloaded, all the pictures in the Pictures folder on the desktop need to be curated.
   1. Delete the blurry pictures, pictures of stuff you considered buying, the ones that have a bazillion copies, and just keep the very best ones.
   2. Any additional photos from SD cards, or digitized prints from friends or family, or any other source, need to folded in.
   3. Ask yourself, what am I going to want to see in ten years?
4. The curated pictures need to be moved from the Mirrored folder on the desktop to your Photo Hub.
   1. The Photo Hub could be on an External Hard Drive.
   2. The photos should be moved from the Pictures folder to the Photo Hub.
      1. If Auto-Sync is OFF, then the photos must be deleted from the Mirrored folder on your computer and from the Pictures (Auto-Save) folder on Amazon Drive
      2. If Auto-Sync is ON, then once the photos have been removed from the Mirrored folder, they will get removed from the Pictures folder on Amazon Drive.
   3. The photos from the Photo Hub need to be uploaded to the Photo Hub on Amazon Drive.
      1. When maintaining the photos, the upload could take between a few hours to a day, depending on the number of photos to back up.
      2. Remember to use the Amazon Photos Dashboard on your computer rather than the Upload feature on web-based Amazon Drive.

Amazon Photos displays the photos from all the folders in Amazon Drive – from the organized Photo Hub, as well as the Auto-Save folders.

Things to notice in this screen shot from Amazon Photos:

• On the left is a list of searchable items, including specific people.
• On the left, you can see the storage usage for photos and for videos. Photo storage is unlimited and free with Amazon Prime membership.  Video storage beyond 5G needs to be paid for – at only $19.99 per year for 100G of storage, it’s very well-worth it if you take a lot of videos.
• On the right, there is a timeline of the photos.
  1. As could be seen, 2019 is missing. This is because I captured this screenshot while I was curating these pictures in my Work/Mirrored folder.  I had removed the 2019 pictures from Amazon Drive/Picture folders, but had not yet loaded the 2019 photos to the Photo Hub. 
  2. The 2018 pictures, and older, are housed in the Photo Hub. The 2020 pictures are housed in the Auto-Save folders.

 If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at amira@PreciousMemsPhoto.com