Dropbox is adding several essential features to Carousel and expanding its reach to cover more mobile platforms.
The cloud storage player also announced the photo viewing app will finally move beyond iOS. Carousel is now available for the web, Android phone, Android Tablet and the iPad app.
"Part of making the best home for your photos is giving you a fast, simple, beautiful way to engage with your pictures, however and wherever you want," states a member of the Carousel team.
As a cloud storage service, asking an individual to upload hundreds or thousands of files may be a bit too much when you don't make it easy to rapidly home in on whatever image a user wants to view. To solve this problem and to spur interest in what has been Carousel's lackluster adoption rate, Dropbox has given the app albums.
Not a novel idea in the least, but the implementation of albums is an essential addition to Carousel -- yes, it probably should have been there from the beginning.
"Carousel automatically sorts your photos by event to make reliving your memories simple," says a member of Dropbox' Carousel team. "But sometimes you want the flexibility to organize your photos your own way. With albums on Carousel, you can."
Along with sorting images into albums, Dropbox has given Carousel a speed scroller. User can quickly move from one end of a massive cache of images to the other.
If adding new features and support for more devices wasn't enough, Dropbox revealed Carousel now supports uploads to Instagram and WhatsApp. The company indicated Carousel could see integration with other services soon, and is asking users what they'd like to see supported next.
While Dropbox plopped its latest Carousel announcements into two neighboring blog posts, the company saved some of the app's news for Microsoft. A few weeks after Microsoft announcing it added Dropbox integration into the iOS version of its Office Mobile App, the Redmond, Wash., tech company revealed it has finally readied the Android version of the software for the same support.
Carousel has had its struggles coming out of the gate. The app is said to have attracted approximately 500,000 downloads, a discouraging figure for a company that serves 300 million users.
But the overhaul of Carousel, expansion of platforms and third-party integration shows Dropbox isn't ready to give up on the app just yet.
"We think of this very much as a long-term bet," says Chris Lee, Carousel product manager. "People have photos and videos scattered across their devices. There still isn't one solution."
