Dropbox launches Carousel app to help you organize and share your photos

[Himanshu Arora]

Dropbox doesn't want to be just storage space for your digital photos anymore, it's also hoping to become the primary way you access and share them. The cloud storage company yesterday launched Carousel, a new iOS and Android app that serves as a gallery for all your photos and videos.

The new app shows photos from all folders of your Dropbox account and can be accessed through any of your devices. There's an obvious limitation though, and that's the storage amount permitted by your Dropbox plan.

You can use Carousel’s sharing tools to share collections of photos with your email and phone contact lists irrespective of whether the recipient has a Dropbox account or not. "We designed this to feel like chat...to feel like SMS" said Gentry Underwood, co-founder of Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox last year.

Another key feature is that the app can be set so that any video and photo on your smartphone is automatically backed up, in full resolution, directly to Dropbox. This means you can clear up local storage and only stream media to your device if needed. With Carousel, Dropbox has put itself into direct competition with giants like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. To give Carousel a ride head here for the download links.

In separate news, the company also announced that Mailbox is now available on Android and coming soon to OS X.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/56340-dropbox-launches-carousel-app-to-help-you-organize-and-share-your-photos.html

 

[Jad Chaar]

It is definitely a nice app for backing up photos. After downloading it and using it I got 3 more GB of storage. Thanks DropBox .

 

[Guest]

I don't understand why Dropbox keeps doing this. I thought they were going to focus on becoming a cloud company that services business/enterprise, but they keep trying to lure in consumer users with these sorts of apps. They've done a great job advertising, and I think they can stop focus on that, and begin to focus on getting their business app more competitive. More apps that actually are useful for business, and most importantly, a way to drastically reduce their pricing. But I guess for now our selfies are safe...

 

[Guest]

I don't understand why Dropbox keeps doing this. I thought they were going to focus on becoming a cloud company that services business/enterprise, but they keep trying to lure in consumer users with these sorts of apps. They've done a great job advertising, and I think they can stop focus on that, and begin to focus on getting their business app more competitive. More apps that actually are useful for business, and most importantly, a way to drastically reduce their pricing. But I guess for now our selfies are safe...

Very well thought-out comment. It does seem incredibly odd that Dropbox spent so much time announcing their big enterprise focus -- only to turn around and develop a number of features that cater specifically to consumer (what business is going to be concerned with users saving all personal photos?).
Any business looking to migrate their material to the cloud from an in-house or consumer solution should be choosing a provider that is truly designed for business. Now, most would point you in the direction of Box, as they have been the popular "Enterprise" provider. However, they still have folder size limitations and restricted user manageability that still makes it difficult for admins. Moreover, the user prices of for each of these providers is utterly insane.
I would recommend going in the direction of DriveHQ cloud solutions. They are one of very few (perhaps the only) companies to design services to optimize on enterprise functionality and pricing. User licenses cost just $6/user/year -- compare this with Dropbox and Box $15/user/month (and thats not even talking about the enterprise pricing)