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Tag: Amazon Photos

June 1, 2025

Four Ways to Showcase your Best Family Photos on your Phone

Are you able to call up any family photo you want on your smartphone? If not, it may be time to update your photo-archiving plan. Here’s what I did.

Our teenage son asked me a question during dinner last week that I had a difficult time answering. He asked if I could show him some pictures from when he was younger. Pictures of when he was younger?! 

I had thousands of photos… tens of thousands from the past fifteen years! But where were they? Could I immediately call up any of these pictures that best represented his earlier years? 

Could I Meet the Moment?
Sure, I could flip though endless photos living in my iPhone. But that would take too long. I started sweating. 

For years, I’d been dutifully curating my family’s photos on my Mac using Adobe Lightroom Classic, but when I received this simple photo request, I wasn’t ready for it.

I took a breath. He kept eating. The opportunity was about to pass. Then, I pulled out my iPhone, opened Apple’s Photos app and quickly went… to my shared albums.

A Shared Photo Album Saves the Day
And yes, there it was… the photo album I had created years ago and shared with my wife that collected some of our Lester adventures. I opened it up, pulled up my chair next to my son and began displaying a few fun pictures from his elementary school years. He smiled, and after a few minutes, we agreed to look at more another time.

After he left, I exhaled. 

Whoa! That was a definite dad moment. And I almost blew it.

Set Up Cloud-Based Photo Albums with Easy Mobile Access
Afterwards, I thought about our exchange and wondered why I had been caught so off guard with this simple request. I’ve spent hundreds of hours working on our family photos over the years. My challenge was more about my phone having easy access to my curated photos from my multiple cameras. 

So, I decided it was time for a little review of my existing photo archiving process and how to give myself better mobile access.   

The obvious way to handle this need is to create cloud-based photos folders/galleries that you can easily view with phone apps. There are plenty of way to do this. But you’ve just got to maintain your plan and keep your albums up to date.

#1
Apple’s Photos App
For an iPhone user, Apple’s Photos app is the built-in solution. The only limitation to shared albums is the pictures are organized in the order you load them in, not in the chronological order of the photos’ time stamp.

A regular (non-shared) album that you set up just for yourself to sync with your iPhone will order the photos in the correct time sequence.

#2
Amazon Photos
Back in 2019, I started using Amazon Photos for my cloud photo archive. The big draw was it was free with unlimited storage of full-res photos… included in the cost of my Amazon Prime membership.

It has an app for my iPhone, and yes, I use it (though I didn’t have a photo album set up with my son’s pics).

The one problem with Amazon Photos is I do worry that one day, Amazon will abandon its interest in photos. And then… poof?

#3
SmugMug
So, I looked for a company with a more photo-centric raison d’être. And I decided to go with SmugMug. I’ve been curating my best photos with this platform across the past few years. 

Also with unlimited, full-res photo uploads, SmugMug has become the platform for my official family archive. But I’m being very ‘precious’ about which photos live there. I think about my SmugMug galleries as an archive that will be handed to the next generation. And I do pay $200+/year to maintain this current strategy.

Yes, of course, I have photos of my son in my SmugMug account, and yes, I have the SmugMug app on my iPhone for immediate access. But I’ve intentionally restricted the photos of my son to ones that more reflect his life’s milestones for future generations to see. (I’m still fine tuning this theoretical goal.)

So, SmugMug is missing a bunch of the fun photos that I’d otherwise want to share with my son today.

#4
Lightroom’s Mobile App
And then it hit me… All the above solutions require me to export selected, edited photos out of Adobe Lightroom Classic’s ecosystem. 

What I had missed was never setting up a syncing solution directly to Lightroom’s Mobile app. I suddenly realized that was the obvious hole in my photo-archiving plan. 

Oops. 

Of course, I already have a great photo collection of our son in Lightroom Classic. So, I loaded the Lightroom app onto my iPhone. Then, with one click, I synced the collection to my iPhone. 

Well, that was an easy fix.

I’m now prepared for my next dinner with my son.

Don’t Fall Behind
It’s important to never let up on any photo archiving strategy. You can see I’ve worked with several solutions over the years. (Part of that is intentional to help protect against unexpected digital-file loss.)

Good photo organization takes a life-long commitment.

If you can’t immediately access the photo you want on your phone, it’s a clue there’s more work to do.

Is your phone ready for your next dinner?

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Image | December 1, 2019

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September 15, 2019

Why I Chose Amazon Photos to Archive my Family Photos in the Cloud

Good photo organization means having a plan that allows you to quickly and easily access your most important photos from anywhere. Here’s why I chose Amazon to help me out…

I’ve talked about how important it is to maintain your most important pictures in cloud-based photo albums that you can access from anywhere, including your smartphone. These are the photos that reflect back on your life’s big moments… not necessarily the best few pics from your recent family vacation.
(Your smartphone’s local photo app and your index finger can handle that.)

If you sit down for a few minutes and think about which groups of pictures you’ll always want available at a moment’s notice, you’ll probably come up a short list of categories.

I decided to create this group of cloud photo albums that I can also share with my wife:

  • Our son’s first day of school each year and his annual school portraits
  • Our boy’s birthdays
  • A sampling from our best vacation photos
  • My mom’s photo archive
  • My dad’s photo archive
  • My photo archive of me growing up
  • Our wedding
  • Other weddings
  • Group shots at big family events

These nine photo albums will hopefully cover most moments when I’m talking with family or friends, and I want to magically access a photo from my life to support the conversation using my iPhone.

But there’s one important technical detail you’ve also got to have in place to ensure your cloud photo albums grow properly over time. And I must admit, I forgot about this piece until I realized it wasn’t there…

Retaining the Constant of Time
Your photos in each cloud folder still need to be sortable by date. That will allow you to keep the chronology of a photo group in order when you add other pictures to the album that are out of sequence.

This may seem like a minor detail, but believe me, it isn’t. The natural order of any group of archival pics is the constant of time. Without that, you’ll eventually end up with what appears to be a random group of photos.

Sure if you start this project when you’re five years old and keep going in perfect order until you’re ninety nine, you’ll be fine. But I’m still sorting through my family photos from many years back.
(I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how much time it takes to keep up with all of your life’s incoming pics.)

Some photos inevitably get integrated into long-term storage faster than others. And the last thing you want to worry about is having to process them in the order in which you took them.

iCloud Photo Streams aren’t the Answer
I thought I was all set using Apple’s tools when I began creating shared iCloud photo albums through Photos to handle this archival need. But then I realized these sharable photo albums were essentially just sharable photo streams. The photos simply positioned themselves in the order in which I uploaded them.

I quickly decided that this wasn’t going to work as I build out these albums over time.
(For the record, Apple does provide a solution if you decide to sync your entire Photos library to iCloud. But that would immediately eat up my 5GB of free iCloud storage.)

So, I set out to explore other cloud photo-album solutions with the ability sort the photos by date…

Photo Archiving for Free
There are lots of choices out there, and some have certain limits or costs. So, I decided to first see if I could get the job done without adding a new monthly fee to my digital life.

And in fact, I could!

Three top choices quickly immediately emerged…

Google Photos

  • Free and unlimited storage as long as you’re willing to let Google compress your photos to a max size of 16MB. (Unless you’re processing huge RAW photos, that shouldn’t be a problem…)

Flickr

  • Free, but only up to 1,000 photos.
  • This limit is a little tight for any long-term plan, although if you’re really talking about the most impactful pictures to represent an entire life, who’s really going to want to look at more than 1,000 pics?

Amazon Photos

  • Free and unlimited storage. Period.
  • The big catch is you’ve got to be an Amazon Prime member.
  • And I suppose that means you’re intending to be an Amazon Prime member… for the rest of your life. (Well, you could migrate your photos somewhere else when a better option comes along.)
  • Amazon offers a solid app for smartphone use.

Primed to Use Prime
I gave Amazon Photos a try a few weeks back, mostly because I already live in the Prime ecosystem. Also, the ‘limitless,’ and ‘no-compression’ structure was appealing.

And though, I am, in fact, paying for Amazon Photos, it’s money I’m already spending on Amazon Prime. And that’s, of course, just another way to make Amazon Prime more than just ‘free shipping.’

I found it really easy and quick to create my cloud albums and upload my photos to them, and the Amazon Photos app works great on my iPhone.

So far… I’m really happy with Amazon Photos.

I’m sure the other options would get the job done as well. The critical element is simply putting a cloud-based solution in place where you can best archive and easily sort through your photos that tell your ongoing life’s story.

Leave the Stream Behind
Ensuring your pictures show up in the right order is essential to the plan. And using the linear nature of time as your organizing principal needs to remain in place.

Cloud-based photo streams simply don’t provide that basic level of functionality.

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