Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Upgrades Cloud Drive Photos App

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) may be finally catching up. Now, will be be able to compete? There are a few photo sharing applications in the mobile space, and many have the ability to automatically upload photos from mobile devices to their devices or to some storage service.  Amazon launched its Cloud Drive Photos app last year, but it wasn’t considered much to write home about.

Oh, but now the upgrade – which may mean that Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) can be a competitor with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) and Dropbox in uploading and sharing photos. This new upgrade features automatic upload of photos to Amazon’s Cloud Drive service. In the past couple months since this app launched, users of the Amazon Photo Drive app could press and hold a photo or entire albums to Amazon’s Cloud storage. But the automatic-upload functionality was not available, which put the app behind those of the competitors.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN)In this upgrade, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has added the automatic upload by default, as is the option to upload only on wi-fi networks (to skirt around any data limits on a  smartphone data plan) – though users must remember the warning that they only have 5 GB of free Amazon Cloud storage space, so electing not to upload photos can be switched manually.

As an additional feature, Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has added in the menu a protocol that directs the app to open the camera on smartphones runningat least Android 4.0 by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), which means users could open the camera from the app rather than needing the separate Camera and Gallery aps to use the features of the camera.

Are you a user of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Cloud Drive? Do you upload photos from your smartphone? Would this be useful to you in any way? And what do you think about Amazon splitting up its music and photos into separate applications, rather than tying them together? We’d like your thoughts about this story or about Amazon in general in the comments section below.

DISCLOSURE: I own no positions in any stocks mentioned.

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