Is Amazon Photos safe to use?

Amazon Photos integrates 4 third-party SDKs for infrastructure. It collects data linked to your identity including Purchases, Financial Info, Contact Info, and User Content and 5 more categories. It does not include any advertising or attribution SDKs. Whether this is acceptable depends on your personal privacy preferences.

What permissions does Amazon Photos need?

Amazon Photos requests 7 iOS permissions: Camera, Microphone, Contacts, Photo Library, Face ID, Bluetooth, and Local Network.

How many SDKs does Amazon Photos have?

Amazon Photos integrates 4 third-party SDKs. 1 for infrastructure and 3 for other. None are for advertising, attribution, or analytics.

Does Amazon Photos access your camera or microphone?

Amazon Photos requests access to both your camera and microphone. The developer says camera access is for "This will let you take new photos or videos that you can upload to Amazon Photos". Microphone access is for "This will let you record audio for the videos you upload to Amazon Photos". These permissions are only active when you grant them in iOS Settings.

Does Amazon Photos access your contacts?

Yes. Amazon Photos requests access to your contacts. The developer states: "This lets you invite contacts to your Amazon Photos Family Vault.".

Does Amazon Photos run in the background?

Yes. Amazon Photos registers 4 background modes, which means it can perform certain tasks when you're not actively using it.

What are some alternatives to Amazon Photos?

Other photo & video apps include ARTA , AI Catch , Airbrush , Body Tune Editor , OldRoll , and Edits . Each app takes a different approach to photo & video and varies in its data collection and SDK usage.

Photo & Video · Privacy report

Amazon Photos: Photo & Video

Free · ★4.8 · AMZN Mobile LLC

Is Amazon Photos safe?

It collects a lot of your data itself.

Our take. Its own App Store privacy label declares Amazon Photos links 9 categories of your data to your identity, including purchases, financial info, contact info and user content. That collection, more than any outside tracker, is the story here.

Privacy footprint · vs 102 photo & videoHeavy

Trackers from other companies0 · none

typical photo & video: 4

Data the app links to you9 types · a lot

typical photo & video: 2 · from its own privacy label

What it collects about you

Amazon Photos links 9 categories of your data to you.

From the developer's own App Store privacy label. These are the kinds of data Amazon Photos ties to your identity.

PurchasesFinancial InfoContact InfoUser ContentSearch HistoryIdentifiersUsage DataDiagnosticsOther Data

Who else is inside

Few or no outside trackers.

Amazon Photos carries almost no third-party trackers, but that is not the good news it sounds like: it collects your data directly, so it does not need them. The collection above is the story.

How it compares

Where it sits among photo & video.

Every one of these apps we have scanned, on the two measures above: third-party trackers it carries (across) and data it links to you on its own label (up). Toward the top right is more invasive.

Each dot is one photo & video app. Amazon Photos sits high on the left: it collects a lot itself but uses few outside trackers.

The evidence

What it's built from.

All 4 SDKs in the app, grouped by what they are for. None are third-party trackers.

4standard libraries

0 of the 4 are third-party trackers. The rest are the app's own code and standard open-source building blocks.

Show the full SDK list

Standard libraries4 · on-device

The app's own code plus open-source interface, storage and networking libraries.

How we know this

Counterspy downloads the app from the App Store and statically analyzes its compiled binary. Embedded SDKs are matched against a signature database and resolved to the company that operates each. We also read the developer's App Store privacy label, which lists the data the app says it collects and links to you. We do not run the app or intercept its traffic, so we report capabilities present in the code and the developer's own disclosures, not proven transmission. We assess privacy and data collection, not malware, security flaws, or developer intent. Reports are automated and never edited for payment. Scan v12.2.0, 2026-04-03.

Third-party trackers are advertising, analytics and attribution SDKs detected by static signature matching. Presence shows a capability is compiled in, not that it ran or transmitted data.
"Data the app links to you" is the count of data categories the developer declares as Data Linked To You in its App Store privacy label. Labels are self-reported and not verified by Apple.
Comparison across the 102 photo & video in our corpus. Trackers: median 4. Data linked to you: median 2.