Amazon Photos Storage Savings Calculator

What Prime's "unlimited" photo storage actually covers

Photos, and only photos. An active Prime membership stores an unlimited number of photos at full resolution, RAW files included, with no re-encoding. Video is a separate allowance and it stops at 5 GB. If you are not a Prime member, the free tier is 5 GB of photos and video combined, which a modern phone passes in a weekend.

That split is the part every "Amazon Photos is free" article skips past. Your Amazon bill is driven almost entirely by the video half of your library: 40 GB of stills costs a Prime member nothing, while 40 GB of 4K clips puts them on a paid plan. Work out your video gigabytes first (the video storage calculator converts minutes of footage into GB), because that single number decides the answer.

Amazon Photos vs iCloud+ vs Google One, priced per year

Amazon sells storage annually, Apple sells it monthly only, and Google sells it both ways. Everything below is a yearly figure so the three are actually comparable. iCloud+ is marked as billed monthly, because that yearly number is twelve payments, not one.

The part the affiliate-heavy comparisons tend to bury: at $139.00 a year, buying Prime as a storage product loses to iCloud+ 2 TB ($119.88) and to Google One 2 TB ($99.99). It only pulls ahead once the alternative is a 6 TB tier. The real saving belongs to someone who already pays for Prime for the shipping and the video and is carrying a second storage bill on top of it. Cancelling that second bill is free money. The cloud storage cost comparison calculator runs the same numbers across every provider at once, and the iCloud storage cost calculator and Google Photos storage cost calculator break down each side on its own.

When a cleanup beats every plan

Three boundaries decide whether you pay anything at all: Amazon's 5 GB of video for Prime members, iCloud's free 5 GB, and Google's free 15 GB. Most people paying for storage are not hundreds of gigabytes past those lines. They are a few dozen, and most of that few dozen is duplicates, burst frames, screenshots of things settled months ago, and screen recordings nobody has opened since.

The asymmetry is the whole argument. A subscription renews every year for as long as you keep the photos. A delete happens once. Clear 18 GB of old video and a $19.99/yr plan is gone for good, not gone for a month.

How to shrink a camera roll before you pay anyone

Work by month instead of trying to face the whole roll at once. Start with the duplicate groups, since near identical shots are the easiest yes-or-no calls and usually the biggest single win. Long videos come next: sort by size and check the ones you have never rewatched. Then batch the deletions instead of confirming them one at a time, and empty Recently Deleted afterwards, because until you do the space has not actually come back.

That is the loop Swipe44 is built around. You swipe through Recents, Random, or one month at a time, right to keep and left to delete. Duplicates are grouped by perceptual hashing done on the phone itself. Everything you mark piles up and goes in one batch behind a single system confirmation, with a running tally of the space freed. No account, nothing uploaded, and iCloud-offloaded originals are never downloaded.