Amazon is doing away with one of its best member perks

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Did you know you got 5GB of free cloud drive storage as an Amazon customer? No? Well, if you were one of the customers that used it, you got an email last week saying the service is going away.

In the email, Amazon says that the closure is “to more fully focus our efforts on photos and video storage with Amazon Photos.”

Amazon wants to push you to a central storage solution, but that’s bad news for anyone using them as a general cloud storage drive.

Any non-photo or video files or files unsupported by Amazon Photos will no longer be accessible after December 31, 2023. Until then, Amazon says you can still use Amazon Drive to access your files.

On January 31, 2023, Amazon is stopping upload ability. The iOS and Android apps for Amazon Drive are being taken down on October 31, 2022, as well.

Amazon has a FAQ page to deal with questions over the transition. The most important for most people is that you should use the Amazon Photos for Windows and Mac desktop app to download any big files.

We’ve tried downloading larger files through the web interface, which doesn’t always work or downloads slowly.

With Amazon Drive closing down, you’ll still get 5GB of complimentary storage on Amazon Photos. Amazon says your photos and videos stored on Drive automatically moved to Amazon Photos.

If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, the photo storage is increased to unlimited. Video storage remains the same.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.