Amazon’s Prime Photos now works with Alexa on Fire TV

Amazon today is rolling out a new experience for Prime Photos, its photo backup and sharing app, on Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. With the update, you can now ask Alexa to display your photos, including those saved to your various albums, photos taken on a certain day, week or month, those snapped at a particular location, or even those of specific people or things – like photos of your dog, for example.

The Prime Photos app comes pre-installed on Amazon devices, so there isn’t much you need to do in order to take advantage of this update.

After adding photos to Prime Photos through your smartphone app or desktop uploader, they’ll automatically appear in the Prime Photos app on Fire TV. You can then use the Fire TV voice remote to display your photos, either by date or album.

One of the features of Amazon’s photo service, which is a perk for Prime members, is a group-sharing feature called “Family Vault.” This allows up to five family members to contribute photos to an album they can all access.

You can now ask Alexa to display those shared photos on Fire TV with a simple command: “show Family Vault photos.”

You can also tell her to play a slideshow of any album, or your entire photo collection.

The Alexa voice search functionality can be used to pull up photos from a particular time frame, too. For example, you can ask Alexa to “show my photos from last year,” “last week” or a particular month or day. You can ask to see photos of specific places, as well, like “all my Seattle photos,” or “photos from New York.”

Alexa can also pull up photos of certain people. The mobile app has a facial recognition feature that finds photos of the same person across your library, and groups them together. In the app, you label these people by name to make searching for photos of them easier in the future. This is especially helpful for parents who want a simple way to pull up all the photos of their children, for example.

If you’ve already labeled your family members and friends in the Prime Photos app, you can use the new voice search option on Fire TV to retrieve those collections. To do so, just tell Alexa to “show photos of Julie,” or whoever it is that you’re searching.

Prime Photos is capable of recognizing objects and other things in your photos, too – like a dog, a ball, or your beach photos, sunset photos, and more. Alexa can retrieve these sorts of photos when you ask – like “show all my photos of dogs.”

Amazon says the new photos experience is rolling out to all customers on Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, starting today. And if you happen to be an early adopter of the Echo Show device, you can ask Alexa to show your photos there, too.