I spent a year working at Dropbox on various photos related products. One of the products I worked on was a redesign of an app called Carousel - a stand-alone app for both iOS, Android and the web that connected to your personal Dropbox account and would accumulate your photos from both Dropbox and your local camera roll - a one stop shop for all of your photos. We were interested in building the best experience for surfacing your meaningful memories through Flashbacks, Smart Story albums, and connections to your friend’s and familie’s photos.
Most people take a lot of photos but they rarely go back and relive those meaningful moments. Flashbacks were designed to take you down memory lane, intelligently surfacing events that happened one, two or even ten years prior.
Remember all those photos you took last year during your vacation - the ones you’ve been meaning to put in to an album to share, but are now lost somewhere in the vast void of your camera roll? Wouldn’t it be awesome if those photos were magically put in to an album for you? This was the idea behind Story Albums - an intelligantly generated and curated collection of your photos that captured a significant memory, helping to keep you organized and inspired.
The best memories include the people who are closest to you. These are the people who show up in your photos most often because you do stuff together, but sometimes sharing those photos isn’t one of those things because it isn’t simple. What if there was an app that knew who you were with when you took those photos and automatically gathered and tagged the right people for you, making it super-simple to send them out? Sharing photos with the people who matter most to you was only a tap away.
The “perfect photo” doesn’t always start out perfect. Sometimes you need to straighten, brighten, or reduce the shadows a bit to bring out that perfection. Becoming an all powerful photo editor was not the goal, but we wanted to offer a basic suite of editing tools to make those small adjustments when necessary.