Dropbox Carousel

Last updated

Dropbox Carousel
Developer(s) Dropbox
Initial releaseApril 9, 2014;6 years ago (2014-04-09) [1]
Operating system Android, iOS, web
Type Photo storage and sharing
Website carousel.dropbox.com

Dropbox Carousel was a photo and video [1] management app offered by Dropbox. [2] The third-party native app, available on Android and iOS, [3] allowed users to store, manage, and organize photos. [4] Photos were organized by date, time and event [5] and backed up on Dropbox. [1] It competed in this space against other online photo storage services such as Google's Google Photos, Apple's iCloud, and Yahoo's Flickr. [5] Chris Lee, Dropbox's head of product development for Carousel described the app as an add-on to Dropbox, a “dedicated experience for photos and videos” and a space for “reliving personal memories”. [5]

Contents

History

Mailbox founder, Gentry Underwood unveiled Carousel at a gathering in San Francisco on April 9, 2014. [1] Much of the features in Carousel come from Snapjoy, a photo start-up, that Dropbox acquired on December 19, 2012. [6] When Carousel was launched, it marked amongst many others, a series of acquisitions made by Dropbox to prep up before opening its stock for public offering. [1] The acquisitions would help demonstrate its expansive product offerings pitching potential profitability to investors. [1]

In December 2015, Dropbox announced that Carousel would be shut down and some Carousel features would be integrated into the primary Dropbox application. On March 31, 2016, Carousel was deactivated. [7]

Features

Carousel prompted users to free local storage once it had synced and backed-up local photos to the cloud. [3] Flashback was a feature (enabled by default) that showed past photos or videos taken the same day, a year, or some years back. [3] Flashback used an algorithm designed to identify human faces - resulting in greater likelihood of the user's picture or people in the user's close circle appearing. [3] A scrollable timeline, which was earlier a scroll wheel, at the bottom let the user scroll to photo(s) at a specific date with a finger swipe. [1]

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References

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  2. Molen, Brad (November 20, 2014). "Dropbox Carousel comes to iPad and web today, Android tablets soon". Engadget. Retrieved October 20, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Lee, Nicole (December 9, 2014). "Dropbox's Carousel app now frees up phone storage for you". Engadget. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
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  5. 1 2 3 Statt, Nick (October 20, 2015). "Google Photos hits 100 million monthly users after five months". The Verge. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
  6. Sottek, T.C. (December 19, 2012). "Dropbox acquires Snapjoy, a photo aggregation and sharing service". Dropbox acquires Snapjoy, a photo aggregation and sharing service. The Verge. Retrieved October 30, 2015.
  7. "Dropbox is shutting down its Mailbox and Carousel apps". The Verge. Retrieved January 25, 2018.