How do I back up copies of photos from Lightroom Classic to Amazon Photos? Is there a way to do so in an orderly fashion or will I have to start organizing from scratch on Amazon Photos?

In the proposal by ​@CORCTON34033231, the photos that you copy in step 1 will not include edits done in LrC - even if you’ve saved Metadata to disk as Amazon ignores XMP data.  The only way to have Amazon reflect the current edited state of the images is to export them and then upload those exported files to Amazon.   However, the standard export in LrC does not include a method to mimic your folder structure as shown in the Folders Panel or your collecdtions as shown in the Collections Panel for the exported images.  But there are plugins that can do this.  Two of them are:

https://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/folder-publisher

https://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/collection-publisher

These plug-in’s export (publish) images in the same folder structure or collection structure shown in LrC.  The developer of these (Jeffrey Friedl) has retired so neither of these plugins is being actively supported but as far as I know they both still work.

Amazon Photos does not support compressed RAW, only Un-Compressed RAW.  For un-compressed RAW files, even though they upload safely at full resolution, the Amazon web or mobile viewer may not properly render previews for every camera model (some may show false color tints or fail to generate a thumbnail), though the uploaded file remains intact.   However, if you use a plugin you can have it save the exported files as JPG which Amazon handles just fine.   Also be aware that Amazon has some other limits and restricitons for videos.

Hi Howard, adding to dj_paige's point: there is no built-in Lightroom Classic publish or upload service for Amazon Photos, so it is a manual copy job, but you can keep it orderly:

1. Copy the original photo folders (not exports) to your SSD, keeping the same folder structure. That folder tree is what preserves your date-based organization.

2. Upload those same folders to Amazon Photos with the Amazon Photos desktop app. Your Lightroom collections live only in the catalog, so they will not carry over as albums; the files themselves, with their capture dates, will.

3. Back up the catalog separately too. A catalog backup does not include the photo files themselves.

Only delete the laptop originals once you have checked that both the SSD copy and the Amazon Photos upload are complete, so Amazon Photos is a second copy rather than your only copy.

I want a set of photos identical to what’s in LRC on Amazon Photos -- I called that backups, perhaps incorrectly. I would ideally like the photos on Amazon Prime to be organized as they are in LRC on my laptop. I’m asking about the best way to do this.

The hard drive on my laptop is running out of space so I want to be able to delete photos from the laptop once I have them on Amazon Prime and probably in some 2d location (maybe a solid state drive; maybe an app like Dropbox). Hope that’s clearer.

Thanks for your help--much appreciated!

There is no direct link that takes photos in Lightroom Classic and sends them to Amazon Photos. You will have to do this manually.

The rest of your question isn’t clear to me, what do you mean by ‘orderly fashion’ and what do you mean by ‘organizing on Amazon Photos’? The best place to organize your photos is in Lightroom Classic and then your “backups” will mirror the organization in LrC.