Dropbox unveils Carousel for organizing your photos and videos

Dropbox today announced Carousel, a product to store and manage your photos and videos. It incorporates features from Snapjoy, a photo startup that Dropbox acquired in December 2012. The launch of Carousel represents a bid for Dropbox to diversify its lineup of products — and potential revenue streams — as it prepares for an expected initial public offering of its stock. The app is available today.

At an event in San Francisco, Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood showed off the service, which organizes photos and videos from your camera roll into an app for Android and iOS. A scroll wheel at the bottom of the app lets you move backward and forward in time with a swipe of the thumb. Dropbox says the app is “one place for all your memories.” All photos stored in the app are backed up to Dropbox.

The app is designed for easy sharing to your phone and email contacts. “I can send hundreds of these in like, a second,” said Gentry Underwood, co-founder of the Dropbox email service Mailbox, as he demonstrated the app onstage. While you swipe through your photos, you can drag them up into a top bar, and then send them to your contacts with a couple of taps.

Building services around the storage and sharing of photos are one of the most reliable methods for a software company to lure and retain customers. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all invest heavily in photo products as a method of spurring growth. Now Dropbox, which has historically positioned itself as a backup service, is taking new steps to expand the range of its photo products.