I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.
Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping, so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.
> I smell a bubble in online photo storage. Every pic I take gets uploaded to G+, Facebook, Dropbox, and apparently now Amazon.
I know what you mean. Lately I've gotten the impression that companies aren't offering photo storage as a feature to entice more people to use their services, but that they want our photos for some reason. Maybe advances in image recognition let them use the photos to mine marketable data?
I think it's simpler than this; they want to fully utilize their compute resources so they can squeeze suppliers for better prices. If Amazon can get a one cent discount on hard drives by buying more, then Amazon.com is cheaper to run.
I wonder how much effort it would be to subject the images to some simple and reversible transform to foil that sort of thing. (e.g., extract every odd-numbered pixel to its own layer, rotate it by 180 degrees, and merge.)
To add one additional bit of supporting evidence, Snapfish (owned by HP) is currently offering a promotion for users of their mobile app (iOS & Android): 100 free prints per month for a year. Yes, 1200 free prints, all from your phone or tablet, as long as you store them at Snapfish.
Aside from the pure storage bubble, I know Amazon is pretty good at shipping, so being able to frame and airmail photographs of the kids to Grandma with free 2-day prime shipping sounds appealing compared to the 50 other competitors in the market with less legendary logistics stills. Take a pix of the kids on the 22nd of december and amazon could probably guarantee grandma would have framed copies delivered before christmas. I could see it.