Syncing photos from Mac OS X Photos to Amazon Cloud Drive

Back in November 2014, Amazon announced unlimited photo storage for everyone with Prime membership. This means that if you have Amazon Prime, you can go to Amazon Cloud Drive and claim your online space. Photos don’t “count” towards your online cloud drive quota (although videos do)– see the snapshot below, where the quotas are clearly separated.

If you’re like me and use iOS, though, it hasn’t been super-straightforward to figure out how to synchronize photos from the new Mac OS X Photos app to your Amazon Cloud Drive. Of course, you can use Apple’s iCloud Photos, but if you don’t want to use iCloud Photos for whatever reason– you’re on a budget, you want to diversify your precious photo collection away from Apple, or you’re just a geek– you may want to try uploading your photos to Amazon.

Important note: the following technique will sync the actual original photos, including dates and latitude/longitude information, but not additional metadata– e.g. Mac OS X Photos album information or any notes. If you want to do that, you should just a more comprehensive backup technique. In addition, in this version, I am excluding video files, which count towards the quota. But if you’re just looking for a straightforward way to move your original photos to the Amazon Cloud, read on!

While doing this is relatively straightforward, I had to figure out much of it myself. First, you could try Amazon Cloud Drive Desktop, but that has the disadvantage of requiring drag and drop of thousands of files and the inability to exclude video files, which do count towards your quota.

I tried a few other things, including DriveSink, but ended up deciding that rclone was the easiest tool to use. From here, I’ll just give you precise step-by-step instructions for how to use rclone to sync your photos to your Amazon Cloud Drive. Note: to follow these, it’s best if you are reasonably familiar with Unix and Terminal commands.

First, open up Terminal– it’s built in to Mac OS X.

Download rclone:

curl -O http://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-386.zip

Unzip it:

unzip rclone-current-osx-386.zip

Copy it to /usr/local/bin (or your favorite directory in your path):

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo cp rclone /usr/local/bin

Configure rclone to sync with your Amazon drive:

rclone config

You should get text that looks like this:

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config

Choose n. I used the name clouddrive when prompted for a name. Choose Amazon Cloud Drive when prompted for the source type. Leave the application client id blank and the secret blank. What then happens is that rclone pops up a web browser that prompts you to log into your cloud drive account and establishes a hidden file (~/.rclone.conf)  that allows rclone to sync to your Amazon Cloud Drive.

Now you’re ready to sync your photos to Amazon! The photos in the Apple OS X photos app appear to be located here by default:

cd ~/Pictures/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary/

And the original photos appear to be located in the Masters subdirectory. From here, let’s make sure it does what you think it will do:

rclone sync -v --dry-run --bwlimit 2M --include '*.{JPG,jpg,PNG,png}' Masters clouddrive:photobackup

The –dry-run flag says what it intends to do without actually doing it. If the output looks correct, go ahead and remove the –dry-run flag and start the task. This will create a top-level directory called photobackup on your Amazon Cloud Drive and start synchronizing all pictures to it:

rclone sync -v --dry-run --bwlimit 2M --include '*.{JPG,jpg,PNG,png}' Masters clouddrive:photobackup

I added the –bwlimit because if you don’t, you can sop up all the upload Internet bandwidth in your house and you could make your family upset with you! See the rclone docs for more information and adjust the parameter as you see fit. Note that Mbps (megabytes per second) is very different from mbps (megabits per second)– Google has a built-in megabit to megabyte conversion calculator if you want to calculate. If you’re not concerned about throttling your connection, though, just remove the –bwlimit argument and go full speed ahead!

At this point, I’m waiting for the upload to finish– it can take a very long time (days even) depending on how fast your upload connection is and how many gigabytes of photos you have.

With that said, you can immediately start browsing your photos. You can go to https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive to see them or your can browse them  on your iPhone/iPad/etc. using the excellent Amazon Photos app. Candidly, I was surprised by how good the Amazon Photos app is– browsing thousands of images is effortless and, from my perspective, snappier and faster than the native Photos app on my Mac.

Overall, I was surprised by how easy the whole process was. Next on my list is to schedule a launchd job to execute the rclone command on a daily basis so that all my latest photos can be uploaded to the Amazon cloud!

Updates:

• If you are using iPhoto 10 or 11 (instead of Photos), use: cd ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library.photolibrary instead of the above. For other versions of iPhoto, see the necessary paths here.
• If you want to upload additional image types (e.g. RAW files) or movies, simply modify the include command above: –include ‘*.{JPG,jpg,PNG,png,MOV,mov,RAW,raw}’. Just note that movies will count against your Amazon Cloud Drive quota (photos won’t), and RAW files *might* (see about RAW photo files for details).
• When you start doing this, you can easily make your life miserable by using up all of your upstream Internet bandwidth. This affects things like browsing, among other things. To get around this, see my blog post on throttling uploads.