Dropbox this morning launched an ambitious new application called Carousel, a photo and video archive and sharing platform that the company hopes will become the go-to place for people to store and access their digital photos.
The application can be found at Carousel.com, and according to Dropbox, it stores as many videos and photos as permitted by your Dropbox plan, and allows you to access them through any device — including mobile, on Android or iOS — through the cloud.
The Carousel app also allows you to privately share original videos and photo documents with others easily, without having to use things with storage limitations, such as traditional email attachments. Carousel’s sharing tools can be utilized through any email address or phone number, whether the recipient has a Dropbox account or not, Mailbox founder and Dropbox exec Gentry Underwood said in an onstage presentation of Carousel.
Dropbox is touting Carousel as “one place for all your memories,” and says that accessing galleries on the application are faster than even the native storage apps on mobile photo galleries.
Carousel is something that seems like it could be a massive company in itself — indeed, photo storage and sharing has been tackled by a number of smart and well-funded teams. With Carousel’s debut, Dropbox has propelled itself into a new realm of competition with the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and others.
It appears to be a thoughtful product that could make Dropbox sticky in a new way to its 275 million users. “It has been so hard to keep Carousel a secret,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said during this morning’s launch event.
My colleague Josh Constine tried out Carousel in a hands-on demo at the Dropbox event this morning. Check that out in the video embedded below:
Update: This story has been edited to clarify that Carousel’s storage is limited by the storage amounts permitted by each user’s Dropbox plan.
Photo by Flickr user Lloyd Morgan under a CC by-SA 2.0 license