Note from Hint Mama: Thanks to the folks at Carousel by Dropbox for sponsoring this post. I only write sponsored posts about services I truly recommend and that I’d be writing a hint about anyway.
Nearly every time I’m about to take a photo with my iPhone, I get this dreaded notification letting me know that my phone is too full of shots to take more: “Cannot Take Photo.”
Then, I’m forced to delete some of the precious videos and photos I have of my children on my phone in order to take more. And often, by the time I’ve cleared up enough phone storage space to take a photo, the cute moment worth photographing is gone.
However, I recently learned about a new tool that is one way to solve the “Cannot Take Photo” problem and that is today’s hint – the Carousel phone application from Dropbox for Apple iOS and Android devices. The cloud-storage service launched Carousel, a photo-gallery sharing and storing app available for devices and the Web, last year to provide a prettier place to view – and an easier way to share – photos and videos kept in Dropbox.
For instance, Carousel is designed to allow for quicker scrolling and has more sharing features (help for those of you that still need to share those holiday photos) than the Dropbox app, and it also has other enhancements like more detailed organization of photos (think by time of day and location versus just by general time period).
But one of the features that most intrigued me (besides the sharing features – more on that below), and is why I recently downloaded the app, is this one: After automatically backing up your phone photos and videos to your Dropbox account, the Carousel app will automatically remove those photos and videos from your phone’s local storage, assuming you opt-in to the feature. (You can opt-in to the automatic deletion feature via the app’s settings or when prompted by the app periodically as your phone storage fills up).
And here’s the beauty of the tool: You can still see the deleted images on your phone via the Carousel app, as well as the Dropbox app, and you don’t have to worry about losing your photos if your hard drive crashes or you lose your phone.
Don’t have room for so many apps? You don’t need to have the Dropbox app on your phone to make the automatic file deletion happen – you just need the Carousel app and a Dropbox account, as well as iOS 8 if you’re an iPhone user (the “Free Up iPhone Space” feature won’t show up on earlier Apple operating systems).
What if you want photos that were deleted put back into your iPhone library? Then, you’d just need to download them back to your phone from the app. Meanwhile, to get the photos onto your hard drive, you’d just need to do the downloading from your computer.
After upgrading my iPhone to iOS 8, the “Free Up iPhone Space” feature calculated that it could free up 14.7 MB of space on my phone. “You have photos and videos safe in Dropbox that are still taking up space in your phone. Carousel can help free up that space by removing them from your Camera Roll. You’ll still be able to see them in Carousel,” the app told me.
To be sure, there are other less high-tech ways to avoid the “Cannot Take Photo” warning, like deleting shoddy images as you take them and making an effort to frequently upload (to your hard drive) and delete photos from your phone. But the Carousel app involves less thinking than these time-intensive methods, and doesn’t leave your images as vulnerable to device failures.
Finally, for those of you that don’t have the same “Cannot Take Photo” problem I do, there are other reasons to consider Carousel, including that it allows you to share many of your photos at once directly from your phone (think no more limits on how many photos you can share in one message) and has other enhancements designed to make sharing photos via iPhone, iPad, Android, and Web easier. Plus, if you download the free app, you’ll earn up to 3 GB of extra Dropbox storage.
Share your experiences with Carousel, and your tips for avoiding the dreaded “Cannot Take Photo” warning, below.
This is a sponsored post written by Hint Mama about my real experience with Carousel and Dropbox, and all opinions expressed are my own. Follow Hint Mama on Facebook and Twitter, and read more about me and my disclosures.
[…] with the images I snapped stored for safe keeping, I don’t have to feel bad about taking down the display and giving the cards to my 2-year-old […]