Dropbox Buys Photo Stream Alternative ‘Loom’ For Its New Carousel App

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Dropbox has been very busy lately. After announcing big updates to Mailbox and the all-new Carousel photo app, a new service is joining its repertoire. Loom, a popular photo and video storage service, announced today that it has been bought by Dropbox.

The news isn’t a complete surprise given the recent launch of Carousel. While it’s sad to see Loom go, the acquisition is very smart on Dropbox’s part.

From Loom’s announcement:

We know this is a big deal. This decision was made with great care. We have worked hard on our product and feel that our vision aligns perfectly with Dropbox’s vision for Carousel. Dropbox has invested the past seven years focusing on building a secure home for your files. And now with Carousel comes a home for your photos and videos as well. We share the common goal of crafting a high quality product, always putting users’ needs first. After spending some serious time investigating if this was the right move for us, we realized that Dropbox has solved many problems around scaling infrastructure and at Dropbox the Loom team will be able to focus entirely on building great features with a fantastic user experience. We are enthusiastic about being able to contribute our ground level perspective to help craft a beautiful experience for our users. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters most to us.

Carousel collects photos in a grid interface very akin to Loom, but Carousel currently lacks a lot of Loom’s features. Besides an iPhone and Android app, Loom is also on the iPad, web, and OS X in the form of a desktop uploader. It also has better sharing features with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this buyout, it’s obvious that Dropbox brings the infrastructure and Loom brings the features. Expect Carousel to come to more devices like the iPad and continue to mature as an app thanks to the Loom team.

And more good news for Dropbox users; your extra Loom storage will be migrated to your Dropbox account. For those with free Loom accounts, that means any referral storage above the included 5GB will be added to Dropbox when you export media from Loom to Carousel. Paid Loom accounts will receive one year of the same amount of storage in Dropbox for free. More info on the transition is available on Loom’s FAQ.

New signups for Loom have ended, it has been taken off the App Store, and the service will shut down completely on May 16th.

Source: Loom

Image: The Sweet Setup 

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