Dropbox Carousel

» see carousel.dropbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

dropbox unveiled carousel on april 9, 2014, at a press event in san francisco, alongside the news that mailbox was now a dropbox property. carousel was a phone app first. it pulled in every photo you had in dropbox plus everything in your camera roll, organized the lot by date and event, then handed you back a private timeline you could scroll through without anyone else seeing it. the pitch was simple: instagram for your own photos with no audience attached.

much of the engineering came from snapjoy, the photo startup dropbox had bought in december 2012. the team had been working on something like carousel inside dropbox for over a year. when it shipped it had a clean ui and a private-share feature where you could send a batch of photos to one person as a kind of conversation thread. the press write-ups were positive. install numbers were respectable for a couple of months.

i used dropbox during this period for cross-device file sync between a desktop and an android phone, the standard engineer use case. carousel never made it onto my phone. by 2014 my photos were already being pushed into google photos by the same android setup that pushed everything else into google, and the part of dropbox i cared about was the folder, not the photo timeline. carousel was solving a problem people who treated dropbox as a personal cloud had. people like me treated it as a file system with a sync icon.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

on december 7, 2015, dropbox announced that both carousel and mailbox would close. mailbox went dark on february 26, 2016, carousel followed on march 31. the company's own blog post explained that the vast majority of users preferred opening photos inside the main dropbox app rather than in a separate one. the migration was painless because the photos had been in dropbox the whole time. carousel had only ever been a different window onto them.

~ what came after ~

the carousel team got reassigned to dropbox's core product. some of the carousel features got rebuilt inside the main app over the following year: the date-grouping, the swipe-to-private-share. snapjoy's founders had already moved on. dropbox went public in march 2018 as a file-sync company that had tried being a photos company, then tried being an email company, then put both attempts away.

~ what got buried with it ~

carousel was an early entry in a category that did not really survive: the standalone private photo app from a non-photo company. google photos was launching the same year on the strength of being attached to gmail and android. apple's own photos app was about to replace iphoto. for a small window in 2014, dropbox looked like it might own the part of your phone where pictures lived. it did not, and the photos kept living in dropbox.com, which was already where they had been.

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