Dropbox is better known for its cloud storage services with a user base of 275 million. In a bid to move away from storage Dropbox has launched Carousel, a photo sharing app for iOS and Android platforms.
If you have a Dropbox account you will find Carousel an interesting addition that wil help you share photos you store in your account. The app also catalogs and categorizes your photos even if they are stored in different folders and organizes them by date. Once photos are organized you can swipe through to a photo and select it to view it full screen and then swipe it to share with others but only through the Dropbox sync route. In plain English it means if you want to share your photos with others, they must have a Dropbox account. You can share photos with such Dropbox account holders and also carry out conversations. You can send photos to them and receive photos from them. You can archive all your photographs and let Carousel organize it through a simple interface. Carousel also simplifies sharing and conversation with other Dropbox account holders. The only way to workaround this restriction is to send photos you wish to share to your mail app and use the mail route to share which might make you wonder how useful this app is when it comes to sharing with everyone. If you used Carousel to send a photo, the addressee will have to download and install the app before they can view the photograph.
The sharing interface is a bit kludge and one hopes future upgrades will refine it. You have to keep tapping and swiping to get anything done such as saving photos from cloud account to your mobile, sharing and so on. You can sort and view photographs only by date, as of now. Perhaps future versions will introduce more options and may also present a photo’s metadata since it is lacking in this version.
Given these limitations would you, even if you do have a Dropbox account, use Carousel when you have others that are not so restrictive?
Dropbox has ambitious plans to move away from only storage solutions and Carousel is only one of the several apps they plan to push to compete with Google, Microsoft and Facebook. It has raised $ 350 million from private investors that could fuel its plans to become versatile. Their new business software offers more security and sharing features for users who can, through the newly introduced Project Harmony feature, view changes made to documents they are collaborating on with others.
Carousel can be downloaded for free on both Android and iOS by following the corresponding links.
