This week saw a couple of new photography-based apps that can expand your smartphone camera's abilities, and can make saving, backing up, and sharing photos easy. Also, we discover an older Android app that's infinitely useful if you own a Mac computer.

Carousel, By Dropbox

Dropbox is quickly transforming from an online storage service to a multi-app cloud platform, and nothing makes that more evident than the fact that Dropbox acquired Loom, a popular cloud storage app for photos, this week. Loom users will be offered the same amount of storage on Dropbox, and one would assume some of its features will end up being built-in to the next version of Carousel -- Dropbox's new cloud photo app for iOS and Android that was released just a few days ago -- making it even better than it already is.

But the current iteration of Carousel is pretty elegant already. Carousel, much like Apple's iCloud or Google+ photo saving, automatically backs up your photos into your Dropbox cloud account.

The free app is likely aimed at convincing Dropbox users at the free level that they could use a little more (paid) storage, and since Carousel is so breezy and graceful to use, that strategy makes a lot of sense.

Carousel provides an infinite-scroll view of your photo gallery, organized by time and place. But instead of, for example, Apple's zoomed-out and cluttered-looking year-by-year view, Carousel has a handy scroll wheel at the bottom that lets you easily flow through decades of photos that are still a normal (not tiny) thumbnail size.

Check it out for Android here.