Dropbox aquires iOS photo app Loom, will fold into Carousel next month

Loom

Dropbox, the cloud storage company that has been slowly building a robust consumer app suite including email management tool Mailbox, has made another fruitful acquisition Thursday, scooping up the popular iOS photo app Loom for an undisclosed sum.

Dropbox will migrate Loom's user base over to its recently released Carousel app by May 16, 2014, and will then shut Loom down. As of today, Loom is no longer accepting new users. The eight-person team, which worked out of San Francisco and Germany, will join Dropbox to work on Carousel.

'We know this is a big deal. This decision was made with great care. We have worked hard on our product and feel that our vision aligns perfectly with Dropbox's vision for Carousel. Dropbox has invested the past seven years focusing on building a secure home for your files. And now with Carousel comes a home for your photos and videos as well,' wrote Loom co-founder Jan Senderek.

To quell user frustration at seeing a dedicated and well-functioning app get swalloed by a larger entity, the two companies will offer users that join Carousel the same storage quota they paid for with Loom for an entire year for free. Loom's pricing -- at 5GB free, 50GB for $49.99 and 100GB for $99.99 -- was only slightly cheaper than Dropox's general storage costs.

Migrating one's files from Loom to Carousel will have to be done manually by users, but Dropbox is setting up a smooth export process with detailed insturctions, Senderek said.

Carousel, Dropbox's answer to its growing photo storage problem, works very much the same way Loom did. By storing photos in the cloud and charging users a subscription fee for storage, it allowed people to snap photos and not worry about how much room they were taking up on the smartphone. But Loom didn't decide to join Dropbox simple because of its larger consumer base.

'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,' Senderek explained. In other words, Carousel did it better. With Loom, users had full-sized photo files stored in the cloud and thumbnails stored on their phone for viewing. With Carousel, that's not needed. All photos isntanteously sync across devices and are accessible in the cloud, taking up zero storage on your mobile device.

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