14 DAY TRIAL // Dropbox is quite a busy bee these days, especially after announcing a slew of new features for the service, big updates to Mailbox, new execs, controversial board members and a new app – Carousel. Now, the company has revealed that it has bought Loom, a popular photo and video storage service.
The announcement comes a bit as a surprise, especially since Dropbox has only just released Carousel, which makes everyone wonder what exactly the purpose of this entire acquisition is.
“We’ve been working hard to create a photo management solution for people just like us. People who have too many photos in too many places, taking up space, collecting dust on our phones, our computers and our external hard drives. It’s a big problem and a common one that many have been grinding hard to solve,” the Loom team writes.
They seem to be quite excited about the deal and look forward to the transition period. “With Carousel, Dropbox has created a gallery for your life’s memories. It’s a single home for all your photos and videos, automatically organized and always with you,” the company writes.
Despite the element of surprise, the decision to accept Dropbox’s offer was made with great care. The service has, after all, worked for years on making user files safe and, with the addition of Carousel, it has provided a home for photos and videos as well.
“We share the common goal of crafting a high quality product, always putting users’ needs first. After spending some serious time investigating if this was the right move for us, we realized that Dropbox has solved many problems around scaling infrastructure and at Dropbox the Loom team will be able to focus entirely on building great features with a fantastic user experience,” Loom writes.
This may sound absolutely great for Loom, but for the company’s users, things aren’t all that pink. As of today, the service will no longer enroll new users, while the existing ones can continue to use Loom until May 16, 2014.
It will be possible to export data directly to Dropbox with no interruption in service. Users will receive an email with more details and instructions, although the process shouldn’t be too difficult. Furthermore, if Loom users decide to switch to Carousel, they’ll receive the same amount of free space they had on Loom on Dropbox, forever. Paying users will also receive the same quota for an entire year.