The announcement of Carousel by Dropbox presents a new and interesting option for viewing your complete photo history stored on a Mac, iOS, and Android devices. If you're already a Dropbox user, this new capability is particularly intriguing.

What Carousel does is create a more practical interface for viewing and sharing Dropbox-stored images. It creates a chronological stream of thumbnails that you can browse by swiping up and down on the iPhone screen, or by swiping left and right on the timeline scale at the bottom of the interface. This sounds simple, but it actually works very well.

Photos are presented as collections with location and date as their title. Up to eleven thumbnails from the collection are initially displayed. If there are more pictures in that collection, a number is shown that you can tap on to reveal the remaining photos.

When you first log in to Carousel with your Dropbox account information, the app integrates all the photos it can find in your existing Dropbox account with those currently in the iPhone's Camera Roll. Additionally, if you're using Dropbox to automatically archive your iPhoto library, those images become part of your Carousel as well.

In a short period of time, the bulk of your photo history is available on the iPhone with very little effort on your behalf. Moving forward, the Carousel is automatically updating itself via these sources.

From that point, you can easily view your collection, or share via email, Twitter, and Facebook, or open in an app for editing. Images that you want to retain, but don't want visible in the scrolling Carousel, can be hidden from the stream and viewed only through an option in the Settings menu.

Using Carousel will require ample storage on your Dropbox account, but frees up space on your mobile device. If you have available space on Dropbox, this is a solution worth considering. Of course, you can always purchase more if necessary.

Currently, Carousel is not compatible with the iPad, and is an iPhone and Android app only. I'll keep you posted as this service evolves.

Carousel has a high Nimbleosity Rating. What does that mean? You can learn about Nimbleosity and more by visiting TheNimblePhotographer.com.

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