The Dropbox photo-train keeps rolling along, acquires Loom photo storage and syncing service

 

 

Dropbox has been keeping busy lately, especially on the photography front. Just last week, they announced Carousel, a photo-sharing app for iOS and Android, which ties to the company's bread-and-butter service—a place for your stuff on the cloud.

But they aren’t wasting any time working on improvements. Yesterday, Dropbox announced that they purchased Loom, a photo storage and syncing service that helps to organize image libraries across multiple devices. It seems like a typical acqui-hire—Dropbox is removing a competing service from the landscape, and adding talented developers to their roster.

Carousel has had mixed reviews since its release last week. For starters, we’ve previously noted that Dropbox offers less free space and charges more for additional storage than competitors like Google Drive, Apple iCloud, and Microsoft Skydrive, not to mention the myriad photo-centric services like SmugMug and Flickr. The New York Times also noted in a review that Carousel feels a bit “spammy,” encouraging users to share their photos with friends, who will have to download Carousel (and sign up for Dropbox) to see the shared images.

Loom, for its part, will shut down on May 16. Existing users can export their stored images to Dropbox and will get the same level of storage as they’d had at Loom—or they can opt to just download a giant .zip file with all of their data.

There are just too many cloud storage solutions to keep track of, so it won’t be surprising to see more consolidation like this in the coming months. Maybe somebody will finally develop a truly excellent photo-library service.

(Via The Verge)