Carousel

Teddy told me that in greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way, a child travels. Round and round, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. – Don Draper

Dropbox released an update for their Carousel app today, and they finally added support for the iPad. I say finally because although the iPhone may be most people’s favorite camera, the iPad is definitely the best place to look at those pictures.

I’ve tried a lot of photo storage solutions, Flickr, Everpix, PictureLife even iPhoto, but in the end I always go back to folders organised by year and event. And for the last year or so, these pictures live in Dropbox. It’s reliable, it’s fast and it’s available on any device.

Before Dropbox released Carousel I used Unbound, but somehow the idea of opening Carousel, and flicking through years of photos (they go back to the early 2000s for me) is more fun than navigating through digital stacks and hierachys.Especially after a trip. I often browse through the photos with friends and family who accompanied me on the trip, and flick the ones they like to the share pane to easily share them after.

Now, with the iPad release, this has become a lot easier. The iPad is easier to pass around and photos display bigger.

I’m really curious how Apple’s iCloud Library will work on the Mac when it’s finished next year. The idea of a native solution to browse any photo on any device is intriguing. But without a proper way to backup those photos, iCloud isn’t reliable enough for me.

It’s not that I don’t trust iCloud, but any service that doesn’t offer an easy way to independently backup your data is untrustworthy by design.

So why do I use Dropbox you may ask? Because I can backup ~/Dropbox/Photos with Time Machine, Backblaze or any other backup service I like. iCloud? Not so much..

There’s one thing though that I miss in Carousel: the ability to exclude certain folders. Carousel currently looks at any folder, so my photos will be interspersed with icons, screenshots and work related images. So some sort of selective sync would be great.