(CNN) — The boom in high-quality digital cameras in smartphones and tablets has also created an overwhelming glut of digital images scattered across devices and services.
The latest company to try and tackle the problem of mountains of digital photos is cloud-storage service Dropbox, which released a new photo and video app called Carousel that should be available in the Android and iOS app stores later Wednesay. The free app is supposed to act as central repository and gallery in the cloud for all your images.
Carousel was just one of a handful of announcements Dropbox made at an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. It is rolling out Android and beta Mac desktop versions of its Mailbox application, a tool for organizing unwieldy inboxes with snooze buttons, swipes and folders.
Dropbox for Business is coming out of a limited beta and users can now have two separate Dropbox accounts — one for their personal belongings and one for business documents. It packs in features that will make IT departments happy, such as remote wipes and audit logs.
The company also announced that former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be joining its board.
For regular users, Carousel is the probably the most exciting new product. Digital photos are often stored across multiple social networks, computers, hard drives and mobile devices. Other services have tried to solve the issue in the past with middling success, such as Apple’s Photo Stream. Dropbox might be in a better position to bring together content from multiple devices and operating systems, and it’s already used by 275 million people.
Carousel brings together any images stored on Dropbox with shots taken on an Android or iOS device. It backs up the full-sized images taken on mobile devices to Dropbox. The apps sorts them by date and location and includes tools for sharing images in a conversation with friends, and saving images they share with you to your Dropbox.
It was already possible to automatically back up images taken on mobile phones to Dropbox, but the Carousel app is a new, nicely designed way to sort through those images. It frees up space on smartphones and tablets but counts towards the allotted 2 gigabytes of free space on individual Dropbox account. Anyone can buy more space from the service.
The-CNN-Wire
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