Dropbox expands outside of cloud storage with Carousel app

Dropbox wants to be your new family photo album. It also wants to be the collaboration tool for companies. And an email manager. On Wednesday, Dropbox unveiled a suite of new apps as part of a broader push to show it is more than about storing and sharing files. The effort is especially crucial as larger tech giants like Google and Microsoft dramatically push down storage prices.

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.