Farewell Amazon Drive, We Barely Knew You

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

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

However, this won’t be an immediate process. First, the Amazon Drive apps will be taken down from Android and iOS app stores to prevent anyone from starting the service when it’s on the way out. Sometime after that, uploads to the service will cease—though your ability to view and download files that were previously uploaded won’t be affected. Finally, the service will shut down entirely and be replaced with Amazon Photos.

According to Amazon, Drive users won’t have to do much to prepare for the change. Photos and videos stored on Amazon Drive have allegedly already been copied over to Amazon Photos, and all you have to do is start using that service instead. Other types of files (such as documents or incompatible media formats) aren’t being moved, however. So if you have anything that won’t carry over to Photos, you’ll need to be sure to download and save it somewhere else before the shutdown.

The closing of Amazon Drive will start with app removal on October 31, 2022. Uploading will be stopped a few months later, on January 31, 2023. Finally, Drive will be shut off completely on December 31, 2023. Android and iOS app users will be able to continue using the app until the service is shut off, but the apps will not receive any future support after October 31 of this year.