Carousel – Gallery from Dropbox for photos and videos | Hacker News Reader

Carousel – Gallery from Dropbox for photos and videos

carousel.com

121 pointsuptown90 comments

You can't use this on iOS without granting Photo permissions, and when you do it automatically uploads all your photos to Dropbox. So this doesn't actually improve the Dropbox photo sharing experience - it demands that your phone's camera be Dropbox's camera. Maybe that's what some people want, but I can't ask the friends and family with whom I want to share photos to use this, so there's no point in using it myself.

Yeah, this is a deal-breaker for me as well. Why can't I selectively push my photos up? There are a ton of photos I would never want synced automatically (multiple shots of one thing where I'm going to pick the best, normal shot vs Instagram shot, screenshots from my phone, images saved from email or the web, etc).

Not to mention I can't get into the apps settings without letting it start to auto-upload thousands of pictures to check if it's going to do it over wifi-only or use my data.

It only uses wifi by default.

Ditto. I signed in and realized what was happening, looked for options in settings... no dice. I tried to sign out, and then it was going to sign me out of BOTH carousel and dropbox, so I just deleted the app. I think you should at least have the option to choose whether you want to update your previous photos, if not more granular controls.

I like their concept of simple sharing of albums. I shouldn't have to sync every photo to use it, though.

You don't need to use Carousel to be on the receiving end. If the recipent isn't a Carousel user, they receive a link to a nicely formatted gallery page with the option to download all the photos in a zip file or copy them to their Dropbox.

Is it just me or does the parallax effect on the landing page need a bit of tuning? I had to scroll much more than similar sites to get a visual response.

Same here, felt like scrolling through molasses.

But it pops[0]! In 10 years I hope we look back at these ridiculous scrolling beasts and laugh at them the same way we scoff at the flash intros from not too long ago.

[0] http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

I hope it doesn't take 10 years.

The modal doesn't fit on my screen(MBA) and under the masthead there's just a ton of empty space... gj dropbox.

When doing parallax, there's a simple rule that you should follow: something big has to be moving at the same exact speed/direction of the user's scrolling. The full-pauses just makes it seem like you're scrolling but nothing is happening.

Using that website is like manually cranking an old movie projector.

I thought the landing page was fantastic.

It does seem a bit off, but I think it's tuned that way to avoid missing some of the animations that are coordinated with only the position of the scroll. Consider the other extreme: https://onlycoin.com/

Coin's is so fast that a quick scroll down in effect skips the animations.

I can't be the only one who thought of the Mad Men "Carousel" pitch. [1]

The stylised photos on this website are in the same genre as those Don Draper used.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWyLaXCV2_s

I also thought about that too. It would be nice to hear from people working at Dropbox if this was the source of inspiration for the app name and page design.

Maybe not the Mad Men scene, but the name and logo are clearly nods to the Kodak Carousel.

Exactly what I thought, especially with the tagline: A home for your life’s memories

Interesting, unfortunately their landing page isn't really telling me a lot about this yet. Is it mobile only? I don't see the difference to the Camera Uploads they are already offering then.

If there'd be something like this, accessible from mobile and your regular browser integrated with Lightroom/Aperture/Adobe Bridge that'd be pretty sweet to keep a copy of your library accessible at all times from anywhere. Unlike my current backups to Glacier. (I know it won't replace a proper backup but it'd be a good additional backup with the side effect of making it accessible from different devices).

Watch the video, it explains it better. It basically looks like a mobile app designed just for viewing photos you have stored on Dropbox. I assume the aim is to offer a better photo specific experience than the Dropbox app can.

Hey loom.com - please feel the heat. I put all my family photos on your service and everyone hates the functionality. I have no desire to use Dropbox for this, and lose all that local storage, but whoever makes photos easiest for the moms of the world will win in the end.

[cough](http://cluster.co). I work on it. It's less "storage/archival" and more "private photo/video social network".

Unlimited and free. So how do we trust that you're also going to be around in a few years?

I think that looks pretty cool, but I feel I should stress that 99% of users don't need _another_ way to organize and share photos - they need a _primary_ way to do that.

When folks sync their cameras and phones, they wind up with massive, disorganized mountains of images in the form of unwieldy iPhoto libraries. At a certain point (say, a year after the birth of a child) the task of going in and manually organizing photos, albums, sets or whatever is so daunting people just ignore it.

That was the promise of Loom - dump your photos here, and they appear automagically in a timeline you can edit and share. The execution leaves a lot to be desired, as I've suggested.

I would love to hear what's important to you in the execution of such a service in case I start actively developing OurDoings again.

Yeah, totally agree about the problem of massive, disorganized mountains of images. A lot of companies shy away from trying to solve that, because ultimately it's profoundly hard to scale it (e.g. Everpix). Loom and Everpix are the closest to really trying to tackle it. Dropbox can "solve" it, as long as you are willing to pay to store your photos in a sync-everywhere folder.

Cluster isn't trying to solve the "organize and share" problem, it's trying to make the stuff you share reach the right people in the right context. I think what Dropbox is doing fits their business model really well and adds a beautiful layer on top of your photos/videos in your Dropbox account.

Is there any documentation or knowledgebase for this? Looks interesting, but can't determine if it does something I want.

You can always try the app. Though I'll stress that it is not a storage/backup solution for your photos. It's for creating private spaces with other people where you can share photos/videos.

speaking of lookout, I just downloaded Heyday, and wished they had Dropbox functionality...Looks like I'll be using Carousel now

We're working on it! We'll support both - I think we solve different problems though.

For a while, Dropbox gave you a few extra GB simply by enabling "Camera Upload" on the iOS app, even if you turn it off immediately after. I think it still does this.

If so, it eases the burden of your dropbox account's space.

> moms of the world

Sorry to go off topic, and I'm guilty of this myself, but this is very sexist and ageist* in that you are enlisting stereotypes against those groups in order to make your point.

*Not that all mothers are old, but that is the stereotype being enlisted, given the context

80% of ShutterFly users are women age 25-50. It's reasonable to want solutions for photo-sharing and enjoyment that are best aimed at that demographic.

I am likely being overly sensitive about this at the moment and read subpixel's post differently than intended. I read it as "it should be easy enough for mothers to use" as if to imply mothers need easier software than everyone else.

Instead I likely should have read it the same way I'd read "whoever makes debugging easiest for the programmers of the world will win in the end."

Carousel is a non-starter for me for the sole reason that it doesn't have the ability to set a root folder. I keep a lot of things in Dropbox, including iWork documents, web sites, and iOS projects and I don't need the "photos" from those projects appearing in the app.

I've been using Unbound, which does let me set a root folder, but turns each folder into an Album when I'd prefer to just have the Photos.app/Carousel timeline view.

I have a buddy who released something similar to this a little over a year ago called "The Carousel" (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/carousel-slide-projector-for...). It's complete with the old slide projector sounds and slide replacement animations (iirc). It sources the gallery images from Instagram.

While being a standalone ipad gallery app, it can also be tethered with apple TV to make your ipad act as the slide projector by mock-projecting the gallery on your TV.

Ah, very excited for this. I have just now been looking at the API of dropbox to look into making a photos app that fits my needs. The big request I have is for Dropbox to render raw files in their website, mobile app, and now carousel. It's great the video shows g-pa taking photos on a film camera, and presumably these are being scanned to jpegs, but what about people who shoot raw, or have images scanned to raw? Would LOVE for my 10000s raw images to be viewable in this. Please. Please? They're just taking up space right now and un-viewable, and dreaming for the day they get "activated".

Initial thoughts from trying it out, I do think its great so far:

- there are some unfortunate missing capabilities (no way to remove conversations)

- got into a stuck spot where I had to force-quit the app (edit: found cause; it was because the 'Share' view's X was not tappable while being on a call.)

- i'm not entirely sure how the auto-import feature will work with how I have dropbox.app already auto-importing... I did a test and I don't have duplicates, but which app is doing it now?

- on ios, this is totally going after the ios photostream, which is fine for me. I do use the photostream with people for shared albums, but this might be more open and customizable if you could remove stuff or make 'albums'. I guess i'd like a way to make standalone ways to share without having the whole conversation paradigm tagged on (which is good for a lot situations, but not all I'd be looking for)

- no raw as expected, but i thought i'd complain again

- the horizontal bar for scrolling date ranges coupled with the standard vertical grid of photos is fantastic.

- Also, what is the point of "hidden" — this one seems like a big curveball. Dropbox/Carousel is like 'your own stuff' so why would you need to hide something; I just don't understand the use case — maybe like you're browsing photos with someone else and you wouldn't want them to see some special photo, but don't want it deleted?

- Swipe down to hide I think is too high of a UI for hiding photos ... If I swipe up to share, I instinctually swipe down to not share and 'get out' of the photo view... I'm glad there's a catch for 'are you sure' but I really would prefer to have it be not that accessible. I don't have a huge need for hiding (as I don't even entirely get it as I mentioned above) so I'm not digging how big it is in the UI

Perhaps you should try Lightroom's new cloud offerings [0].

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/learn/start/tutorials...

I've reviewed their offerings since they announced with great interest, but it doesn't have the whole 'sync' across devices as neatly coupled as this (dropbox) does. They only sync up the 'smart preview's of the raw files from the desktop. There is also a 20gb limit. I am nearing the 200gb limit of my dropbox.

Right now w/ Dropbox/Carousel, I have mobile photos uploaded via Camera Upload and that is a watched folder in Lightroom, so now my Phone/Pad/Web/Desktop-Lightroom are all in terrific sync, just without RAW files being viewable anywhere but Desktop.

Lightroom for Mobile doesnt seem to have a set limit:

From their FAQ {1]: Does syncing images to Lightroom mobile use a portion of the 20GB of cloud storage I get with my Creative Cloud complete membership?

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/lightroom-mobile/faq.html No, the images synced to Lightroom mobile are not counted as a part of your 20GB of cloud storage.

Have you seen this app? Cloud Preview https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cloud-preview/id838049140?mt...

Its just a viewer for raw images.

It's available now: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dropbox.ca...

Is there a service that does this, but lets you store the photos in the cloud?

1. Take a pic

2. Pic gets uploaded to the service, after x gets deleted from local device, only a small thumbnail remains.

3. Open this history view, you can see thumbnails, pic gets downloaded when you click on it, large pic gets deleted again after x.

If I had something that worked like this, I would be so happy.

This is mostly what Carousel does. The photos are all stored in Dropbox. What it doesn't do is your #2, which is to automatically delete the photos from your local device after a period of time. You can do this safely yourself, though, since the files are all stored in Dropbox.

Picturelife kind of works the way you describe. It doesn't delete your camera roll automatically but other than that it's just a big online storage for your photos. You can browse all of your images from the mobile app and it shows thumbnails until you zoom them.

Referral link: https://picturelife.com/?love=YqDZtHd3OI99uX

+1 Recommend Picturelife.

It would be nice if there was just a little more branding to show that this is a Dropbox-created product. "from Dropbox" isn't as clear as "by Dropbox". (Are photos being served "from" my Dropbox?) I didn't scroll all the way to the bottom the first time on the page to see the copyright.

If you are interested in Carousel you might also be interested in a service I built and am currently beta testing:

http://www.yearloop.com/

Each day it sends me an email with pictures from 1 yr ago, 2 yrs ago, etc. It is also powered by Dropbox.

I love this! I'm a Sk-er..OneDrive user though...any chance that a) they have APIs that serve your needs and b) you have time to do the work to support OneDrive?

No plans to tackle this at the moment, but looks like they have a REST api. Shoot me an email (check my profile) and I'll let you know if I pursue.

No email on your profile that I can see! Is your code on github by chance?

How is it different from Timehop? http://timehop.com/

Timehop shifted focus onto their app. I'm not sure I even get the emails from them anymore. (Checking my timehop email used to be a daily event for me...)

This flashback emails were the best part of Everpix, glad to see someone doing this

Ever heard of Flickr.? 1 tb for free. Dropbox out of blue has started to lose the territory , where it always been a king. Cloud Storage.

I meant we are living in the age where people're giving away 1tb here and there. Speaking of 1 tb, how exactly this would be different than, let's say the flickr iOS app itself.

I love dropbox because I have piled up 19gb free storage, because i am a whore and have plenty of email contacts, nevermind. But If I would ever need to shell out some money, hmmm well, I would definitely look for a company which is a reliable and cheaper and even better has its own data centers. you guessed it right. who I am referring to.

I want to like FlickR so much. I've been a premium member for years but their upload client for more than a few photos at a time is garbage. I also don't like how crude their online organization options are. I know with a bit of polish, it can be the king of ease in interface, but right now I am looking for something a bit more modern. Carousel COULD have been a no-brainer replacement, but I am glad I came here to get the insight of others; while FlickR may do a lot of things wrong, it sounds like Dropbox fails even harder on the organizational scale (root folders?)

How many people want to rent space in the cloud to store all their photos? If our home did it we'd have to pay 2x $199 (200 GB each) or 2x $499 (500 GB each) per year -- plus buy computers with storage large enough to ferry this around (or external HDs).

Apple offers "photostream" as a free, transactional mechanism to move photos from phone to computer -- the central storage and usage of photos remains at home. Why would I pay a cloud storage company $400 or even $1,000 per year to keep my own photos?

"Carousel automatically backs up photos and videos to Dropbox as you take them"

Yes, but also:

Dropbox automatically backs up photos and videos to Dropbox as you take them.

All my photos... from now on? Can this check and index photos stored on my computer (not on dropbox) or on photo services like Flickr, and social networks as well? If it's supposed to be a one stop shop I would want something like that. The details are kind of few and far between...

Neat. We just had our first child and I'm once again weighing various methods of storing / accessing all the photos I'm taking. Right now I'm mostly using physical backups and S3, but having a better way to browse the archived images would be great.

I have a local backup of my S3 bucket which uses Trovebox as a web/mobile frontend.

https://jmathai.trovebox.com/photos/album-hg/token-d0386fc3f...

Source available at https://github.com/photo/frontend

Flickr gives you 1TB, and I back my Flickr account up to Glacier.

Clear now that the SnapJoy guys did not just disappear, I would venture this was out of their work.

It's interesting how this is a separate app from the Dropbox app (I make this assumption because the app store links say the app isn't up yet). I'd imagine with DB's mobile pictures push the app would be integrated into the DB app itself.

This makes perfect sense, as Dropbox tries to be a backend to your storage rather than a frontend. Carousel is at the same time a potentially great app and an invitation to try Dropbox's API. Helps the competition to build even better photo experience on top of it.

I think they're trying to copy Google+'s "Photos" app which takes over the gallery while offering background upload in the same app.

Although on Android with Google+ it's bundled in the same apk, just 2 separate Launcher icons.

IF you're looking for a photo/video gallery for not only Dropbox, but Google Drive, Flickr, Facebook, and more, check out http://cloudgalleryapp.com/

That video...escalated quickly.

Does the storage space for your photos come out of your Dropbox quota or is this separate? Are the photos shown just all the photos in my Dropbox or from a particular folder? The website needs more details.

https://www.carousel.com/help

Q: How many photos can I put in Carousel? A: The only limit to the number of pictures you can put in your Carousel is the amount of space in your Dropbox. If you have a 100 GB Dropbox account, you can have up to 100 GB of photos (that’s about 40,000 of them!) and videos in your Carousel.

Q: Where are my photos saved? A: Photos in your Carousel are stored safely in your Dropbox account. Specifically, photos you take are saved in your Dropbox’s “Camera Uploads” folder. Photos that you choose to keep will be found in your Dropbox’s “Carousel” folder. Within the “Carousel” folder, photos will be stored in folders named after the person who sent you the photos.

I skipped ahead and got right to the part where the woman was pushing/yelling during delivery. I had reread the title again just to make sure I was looking at the correct video.

It's interesting to see this. Realplayer Cloud has been doing the video part of this. Moreover, they let me cast it on Chromecast. How is this any better for videos?

I miss Everpix :'(

Wow I didn't know it was dead. I feel like there's really a need for a good photo/video management application. I didn't really like Everpix though, I felt like it was poorly made. Maybe that kind of thing need a desktop application to be truly good.

"Carousel is taking longer than expected to go live in the App Store & Google Play. Please try again in a few minutes."

even after waiting a couple minutes, it's still showing me that message.

They should add some kind of email signup to be notified when it's in the App Stores.

Its actually up, they need to remove their js blockade https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dropbox.ca...

How does this differ from / integrate with the existing camera uploads in dropbox?

Nice scroll animation.

"This app requires a camera flash". Why :( ?

Apple doesn't allow developers to restrict releases to explicit hardware revisions, so having that requirement keeps out anybody pre-iPhone 4.

So how the hell do I upload 250GB of photos to them without dying of old age?

Slow and steady.

At 2Mbps upload it's only about 12 days.

I've never had an upload to anything make it past 4-6 hours without some kind of hiccup, crash, or 404 from the host, much less 288 hours. And that's not counting transport errors on my side (I'm on WiMax). Assuming Dropbox can recover from partial uploads, I'd still expect an entire month or longer to get it all uploaded.

Now what happens if it's a terabyte? I'm supposed to saturate my upstream for 3-4 months?

Wait... this isn't one giant terabyte zip file we're talking about right? This is a bunch of 3 - 5MB jpgs, some 75MB-300MB video files? That accurately describes the media I have starting from 3 years ago when my daughter was born.

A failed upload only interrupts the file currently being uploaded, not the previously successful ones.

Agreed. "Assuming Dropbox can recover from partial uploads" meaning Dropbox can pick up where the upload stopped and keep going. But let's say it's halted at 99%, if Dropbox has to re-check every single file from the start to see if it's in sync, then there's gonna be a penalty there too.

Syncing files is pretty much Dropbox's core business. Of all the things to worry about them getting right, that one wouldn't concern me.

What a innovation. Share you´re photos. Sorry but cancled my account some months ago and switched to btsync and a local hoster. But yea, nice appleishstartup video with the typical funny guitar thing.

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