Farewell Amazon Drive, We Barely Knew You

Amazon will close its Amazon Drive cloud storage service, focusing on Amazon Photos instead.

If you use Amazon Drive to store photos and videos, it won’t be that way for long. The company has confirmed that it will no longer support the cloud service and shut it down completely in 2023. But don’t worry about the media you’ve uploaded, it will end up on Amazon Photos instead.

However, this will not be an immediate process. First, the Amazon Drive apps will be removed from the Android and iOS app stores to prevent anyone from starting the service when it’s about to leave. Some time later, the uploads to the service will cease, although your ability to view and download files that were previously uploaded will not be affected. Finally, the service will be shut down completely and replaced with Amazon Photos.

According to Amazon, Drive users won’t have to do much to prepare for the change. The photos and videos stored on Amazon Drive would have already been copied to Amazon Photos, and all you need to do is start using that service. However, other file types (such as incompatible documents or media formats) are not moved. So, if you have something that won’t transfer to Photos, you’ll need to make sure you download it and save it somewhere else before shutting down.

The Amazon Drive shutdown will begin with the removal of the app on October 31, 2022. The upload will stop a few months later, on January 31, 2023. Finally, Drive will shut down completely on December 31, 2023. Android and iOS app users will be able to continue to use the app until the service is deactivated, but the apps will not receive any future support after October 31 of this year.