If you are a Prime Member of Amazon you probably already know about the amazing benefits that the service offers to its members: Free 2-day shipping on almost anything, tons of TV shows, videos, music, you name it.

Now, you'll be able to take even more advantage of your Prime membership, by taking as many photos as you want -- and having unlimited cloud storage to back them up.

Just announced by Amazon, Prime members now get an unlimited amount of storage for photos. Storage issues for avid shutterbugs just went away.

In the past, people would normally buy external hard drives to back up their massive photo libraries. But hard drives can crash -- and all inevitably die out.

In recent years, cloud storage has become the best alternative. Unlike physical hard drives and portable disks, a cloud is based on remote distributed industrial servers with backup systems, meaning your files can practically never be damaged or lost, aside from the unlikely case of a catastrophic failure (the downside is that cloud files are less secure against hackers, as was illustrated recently).

But unless you don't have very many pictures to backup, most users likely end up having to pay for extra space after filling their introductory free quota for cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box.

While it's true that you have to have an Amazon Prime Account ($99 per year) to get Amazon's free cloud storage, Amazon's announcement will strike those who already subscribe to Prime for its other advantages as a free, unlimited bonus. (Caveat: Amazon is giving you unlimited photo storage. Videos still count against your CloudDrive quota.)

And for Prime members, it's easy to set up, backup, and automatically save all future smartphone pictures to your CloudDrive.

Once you are in Amazon CloudDrive, simply locate the folder that your pictures are stored in. After doing that, you want to minmize the window (it works in the background). Uploading a lot of pictures will take up a ton of your computer's RAM so make sure you aren't doing too many activities. If you find a time to just leave the CloudDrive working in the background and leave your computer plugged in and on, you will be happier for it.

Just let CloudDrive take it from there -- it will backup all your pictures to the cloud.

Surely Google and other companies will follow suit, as cloud services continue to compete for dominance. For one example, Microsoft has already unveiled a similar unlimited cloud storage bonus to all Office 365 subscribers, allowing them unlimited OneDrive storage for all files (including automatic photo backup), at no extra cost.

What do you think about the Cloud? Do you have an Amazon Prime membership? Leave us a comment below and let us know.

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