14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox has been evolving beyond just being a cloud storage and file sync service – and it needs to, with all the competition it's seeing. Cloud storage isn't easy, but it isn't very hard either, so Dropbox needs to stand out, despite its early advantage. One way it's doing this (the major way, in fact), is with photos.
The company made it possible last year to automatically upload photos you shoot on your phone or you camera when you plug it into your computer. More recently, it started syncing mobile screenshots as well.
Now, it's expanding the capability to the desktop client; granted, just on Mac. Screenshots taken can be automatically uploaded to the dedicated folder by using the keyboard shortcut.
It's a small addition and one that will only be useful to a few people, but it's an important one, as Dropbox aims to position itself as your main online photo repository.
There's plenty of competition in this space as well. Most people upload photos to Facebook and are done with it. But having to upload all the photos manually means that only a few of them end up online
Dropbox wants to make the whole process seamless, so you don't really need to do anything to get your photos online once you have the feature set up. Photos are important to Dropbox since they're the one thing most people have in the thousands and that still takes up a lot of space.
Google+, Facebook, and even Flickr are offering infinite (or what amounts to infinite) storage for your photos, but with some limitations, such as size and file type. Dropbox will store your original photos, even in RAW formats, at their original size.
This quickly eats up any free space you've earned and Dropbox hopes it will be enough to push you towards the paid tiers. And once you have thousands of photos stored in Dropbox, you're not going to switch to another cloud very soon.